The slavery connections of
Northington Grange
Dr Laurence Brown
School of Arts, Histories and Cultures
University of the Manchester
June 2010
2
“A real and material source of wealth and power”
Alexander Baring on Britain’s slave colonies
in the Caribbean (1831)
3
This report was commissioned in November 2008 as part of a project to
explore the slavery connections of four historic properties in the stewardship of
English Heritage. Archival research was carried out on Bolsover Castle,
Brodsworth Hall, Marble Hill House, and Northington Grange to examine the
impact of slavery-generated wealth on the development of these properties.
The research follows the 2007 survey by Miranda Kaufmann on the family
history of 33 English Heritage properties and their slavery connections. Using
databases on slave voyages and slave compensation, Kaufmann’s study focused
on those who owned property in slave colonies, held government office in such
colonies, invested in slaving or traded in slave produced goods, were engaged in
abolitionist debates or legal decisions on slavery, or who owned black servants.
The aims of this report are to provide more detailed information on the
economic, social, and cultural connections that linked Northington Grange to
Atlantic slavery. The report examines the relative importance of slave-generated
wealth in the fortunes of Northington Grange’s occupants and how these
changed over time. It then details the extent to which wealth from slavery shaped
the physical development of the estate and its aesthetic design.
4
Contents
1) Executive summary
2) The Henley family and the construction of Northington Grange
3) Shanley v. Harvey
4) John Ellis and colonial botany
5) Provisioning empire: The Drummond family
6) The Prince of Wales at the Grange
7) Defending slavery: Henry Dundas
8) William Wilkins and the classical transformation of the Grange
9) The Baring family and the trans-Atlantic slave trade
10) The Bingham connection: Privateering in Martinique
11) State finance from Saint Domingue to the Louisiana Purchase
12) Free trade’s champions, abolition’s opponents
13) Slaves as commodities, slaves as commodity producers
14) The Webster-Ashburton Treaty
15) Baring Brothers in Saint Croix
16) Slavery-related symbolism and design at Northington Grange
17) Tropical planting at the Grange
18) Recommendations for further research
19) Bibliography
5
Figures
Figure 1:
Annual Slave Imports to Dominica, 1764-1799
Figure 2:
Distributed Profits of Messrs Drummond, 1777-1820
Figure 3:
Genealogy of the Drummond Family
Figure 4:
Genealogy of the Baring Family
Figure 5:
Distributed Profits of Baring Brothers & Co, 1762-1867
Figure 6:
Enslaved population on Upper Bethlehem estate by age and
gender, 1841
Figure 7:
Enslaved population on Fredensborg estate by age and gender,
1841
Tables
Table 1:
Slave imports to British Caribbean, 1751-1800
Table 2:
Destinations of Loyalist Refugees from East Florida, 1785
Table 3:
Portraits with black servants by Joshua Reynolds
Table 4:
Place of birth of slaves on the “Big Gang” at Upper Bethlehem
estate, 1841
Table 5:
Occupations of the enslaved at Upper Bethlehem estate by age and
gender, 1841
Table 6:
Occupations of the enslaved at Fredensborg estate by age and
gender, 1841
6
1) Executive summary
Northington Grange near Alresford in Hampshire is one of Britain’s most
striking country houses with its eastern façade dominated by enormous Doric and
Ionic columns that give it the appearance of a transplanted temple from ancient
Greece. The Grange was originally part of the demesne lands of Hyde Abbey in
Winchester which were seized by the crown in 1538. In 1662, the estate was
purchased by Sir Robert Henley (c.1624–1692) who replaced its modest country
house with what contemporaries described as a “considerable mansion"
designed by William Samwell (1628-1676). Built between 1664 and 1673, the
house drew such praise for its “noble and regular structure”, internal proportions
and great staircase that it was often attributed to the celebrated British architect
Inigo Jones (1573–1652). 1
The Henley family owned the Grange from 1662 to 1787 during which
period the surrounding park was extensively landscaped, including the creation of
an ornamental lake and large vegetable and fruit gardens in the mid-eighteenth
century. 2 Banker Henry Drummond (c.1730–1795) purchased the Grange in
1787 and it was his grandson who transformed the seventeenth century mansion
into one of the leading expressions of Greek Revival architecture in Britain. From
1804 to 1809, Samwell’s square brick house was encased in Roman cement and
1
Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, Winchester, 44 M 69/E22/1/1/1, 1787
Particulars of the Grange Estates
2
Jane Geddes, “The Grange, Northington”, Architectural History, 26 (1983), p. 42.
7
decorated with a large Doric portico and friezes designed by William Wilkins
(1778–1839).
In 1817 Northington Grange was acquired by another banking dynasty, the
Baring family who employed a series of architects to remodel the living
accommodation of the house which had been compromised by Wilkins’ dramatic
exterior façade. Sir Robert Smirke constructed a western extension for the house
in 1817, which was followed in the mid-1820s by the additions of a dining hall and
conservatory designed by Charles Cockerell (1788–1863). In 1868, architect
John Cox was commissioned to conduct an extensive internal re-design of the
house to allow more light and space for its occupants.
Plan of the Grange
8
Paralleling the remodelling of the Grange’s interior, Alexander Baring
(1773–1848) also sought to extend and improve the estate’s park and gardens. A
formal Italian terraced garden was added to the south of the house in 1826 by
Cockerell, while the property’s kitchen gardens were extended from two to six
acres. Under Baring there was extensive planting of ornamental trees, such as
cedars, and further water-features were added to the park.
Alexander Baring was succeeded at the Grange by his son Bingham
Baring (1799–1864), second Baron Ashburton. An MP from 1826 and a peer
after 1848, he was also a Fellow of the Royal Society and president of the Royal
Geographical Society in the early 1860s. The estate was passed onto Alexander
Hugh Baring (1835–1889), fourth Baron Ashburton, who extended the house and
added new plantings to the park. In 1889, the property was inherited by Francis
Denzil Edward Baring (1866-1938), fifth Baron Ashburton who converted the
conservatory into a picture gallery. The Grange was sold by the Barings in 1933
and owned between 1934 and 1964 by industrialist Lewis Wallach who intended
to use it to display his extensive art collection (much of which was subsequently
destroyed in World War Two).
With Wallach’s death, the deteriorating estate was purchased by the
Baring family. In the early 1970s, the fittings of the house were auctioned off, its
roof removed and the western extension demolished including the dining room
designed by Cockerell. This revealed part of the façade of Samwell’s original
9
brick mansion. As a result of the threatened destruction of the house, the Grange
was taken into guardianship in 1975 first by the Department of Environment and
then by English Heritage.
1.1) Slavery connections of the families living at Northington Grange
Three political dynasties lived in Northington Grange from the seventeenth
to the nineteenth centuries – the Henley, Drummond and Baring families. Their
prominence in Parliament as well as their activities in law and banking resulted in
significant social and economic connections to Atlantic slavery.
As Lord Chancellor, Robert Henley (1708-1772) held in the case of
Shanley v. Harvey (1762) that “As soon as a man sets foot on English ground he
is free”. Henley was also a patron of naturalist John Ellis (c.1710–1776) who
strongly advocated the use of economic botany to expand Britain’s slave colonies
in the Americas.
The Drummond family purchased the Grange in 1787, and were
connected by marriage to Henry Dundas (1742–1811) who a decade earlier had
argued before the Scottish courts that slavery was incompatible with Scottish law.
However in 1792, Dundas’s intervention in Parliament was significant in delaying
abolitionist legislation for another decade and a half, resulting in Wilberforce
seeing him as a key opponent of the abolitionist agenda. As secretary of state for
10
war from 1794, Dundas was also engaged in organizing substantial military
campaigns to defend and expand Britain’s slave colonies in the revolutionary
Caribbean during the 1790s.
The Grange was sold in 1817 to Alexander Baring (1773–1848) who in
Parliament was a prominent defender of free trade in slave-produced
commodities such as cotton and sugar, while also opposing the immediate
abolition of slavery in the British empire during the 1820s. In 1842, Baring
negotiated the Webster-Ashburton treaty at a time when relations between Britain
and America were strained because the British colony of the Bahamas had
provided sanctuary to a group of slaves who had mutinied and seized the ship
that was transporting them along the American coast.
Archival research in the surviving records of the Drummond and Baring
families and a survey of eighteenth and nineteenth century newspapers did not
provide any reference to a black presence at the house. From 1795 to 1800
Northington Grange was leased to George, Prince of Wales (1762-1830), as a
hunting lodge. The future King George IV did have close contact with black
servants and musicians around the time when he was visiting the Grange,
although the extent to which they may have accompanied the Prince requires
further research.
11
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Grange was also briefly leased
by James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale (1736-1802) whose extensive landholdings
had been significantly funded by his father’s position as Governor of Barbados
during the 1720s and their ownership of a sugar plantation on the island. 3
Lowther himself inherited slaves after his father’s death in 1745. For further
discussion of the Lowther’s engagement with Caribbean slavery see the English
Heritage report on “The slavery connections of Marble Hill House”.
In the 1850s, the Grange was the focus of a literary salon centred around
Harriet Mary Baring (1805–1857) and her husband (William) Bingham Baring
(1799–1864), who held the titles of Lady Ashburton and second Baron
Ashburton. Amongst the regular guests to the Grange were the writer Thomas
Carlyle (1795–1881) and his wife Jane Carlyle (1801–1866) with whom the
Barings shared a close friendship from 1839. Carlyle published and republished
his caustic "Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question" (1849 and 1853), at a
time when he was visiting the Grange several times a year. 4 The "Occasional
Discourse” critiqued the empty philanthropy of abolitionists and the failure of
emancipation in 1834, with the image of the ex-slave Quashee gorging himself
on pumpkins and refusing plantation labour. 5 Such a vision was a gross
distortion of the conflicts and harsh material conditions that marked emancipation
3
J.V. Beckett, “Inheritance and fortune in the eighteenth century: the rise of Sir James
Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale”, Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland
Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 87 (1987), p. 177
4
http://carlyleletters.dukejournals.org/
5
Thomas Carlyle, "Occasional discourse on the Negro question", Fraser's Magazine for
Town and Country 40 (1849), pp. 670-679; Thomas Carlyle, “Occasional discourse on
the Nigger question” (London: Bosworth, 1853)
12
in the British West Indies in which some planters attempted to starve their former
slaves into submission while others evicted them or their families from plantation
land for refusing to follow the work regimes that replicated those of slavery. 6
Another frequent guest at the Grange during the mid-nineteenth century was
writer James Froude (1818–1894) who later visited the Caribbean in 1887 where
he blamed the limited economic development in Britain’s colonies in the region
on the racial failings of their Creole populations. 7
1.2) An assessment of the slave-generated wealth of the families at
Northington Grange
In 2006 the Royal Bank of Scotland commissioned an investigation to
explore links between slavery and its predecessor institutions including the
Drummonds bank. They found that the Drummonds neither directly owned
slaves, nor invested in the slave trade or slave plantations in the Americas. 8
Equally Alexander Baring in 1823 identified himself before Parliament as a
disinterested commentator on abolition, who neither owned slaves nor invested in
6
Laurence Brown and Tara Inniss. "Slave Women, Family Strategies and the Transition
to Freedom in Barbados, 1834-1841" in Gywn Campbell, Suzanne Miers and Joseph
Miller, eds., Women in Slavery, (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007), pp. 172-185;
For a study of Carlyle’s engagement in debates generated by the Morant Bay uprising in
Jamaica in 1865 see Catherine Hall, “The Economy of Intellectual Prestige: Thomas
Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and the Case of Governor Eyre”, Cultural Critique, 12 (1989),
pp. 167-196.
7
James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies; or, The bow of Ulysses
(London: Longmans Green and Co., 1888); For a critique of Froude by a Trinidadian
intellectual see J. J. Thomas, Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude
(London: T. F. Unwin, 1889)
8
“Historical Research Report: Predecessor Institutions Research Regarding Slavery and
Slave Trade”, Citizens Financial Group and Royal Bank of Scotland Group, May 2006.
13
the slave trade. 9 However, both Drummonds and Barings did derive substantial
economic benefits from the slave societies of the Caribbean and North America
through providing financial services both to private slave owners and the colonial
state.
Drummonds bank held accounts for Caribbean planters, while Henry
Drummond (c.1730–1795) drew a considerable part of his personal wealth from
his contract as Paymaster to His Majesty’s Forces in North America and the
Caribbean. During this period, the army both provided a route to freedom for
some slaves in Britain’s war-torn mainland colonies and had a significant role in
policing slave society in the West Indies.
Alexander Baring’s initial fortune was substantially derived from his
marriage into the Bingham family of Philadelphia whose wealth had partly
originated in trade and privateering from the French Caribbean colony of
Martinique during the American War of Independence. As a partner in Baring
Brothers bank, Alexander also profited from the trade in and the insurance of
slave-produced commodities (particularly cotton), and from providing banking
facilities to slave owners in the Caribbean islands and the American mainland.
Most dramatically, in funding the Louisiana Purchase in 1802, Baring drew a
substantial personal windfall from the massive expansion of slavery across the
American South.
9
Substance of the Debate in the House of Commons, on the 15th May, 1823, on a
Motion for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British
Dominions, (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1823), p. 97.
14
1.3) Property development and slave-generated wealth
It is difficult to provide an exact balance sheet of the proportion of slavegenerated wealth of the Grange’s owners, however the timing of property
development at the Grange often corresponded with slavery-related profits. The
purchases of the Grange estate in 1787 and 1817 appear to have drawn heavily
on sources of income in the Americas, particularly the Drummonds’ paymaster’s
contract and Alexander Baring’s marriage to Anne Bingham.
The £30,000 transformation of the Grange by William Wilkins between
1805 and 1809 does not appear to have been directly funded from colonial
sources.
Alexander Baring financed significant landscaping at the Grange in 1819
and 1839 twice extending the park with new planting and expanding its water
features. Between 1823 and 1826 Charles Cockerell was commissioned to add a
Corinthian portico, large conservatory and dining room to the main house. Such
developments were certainly facilitated by the substantial profits enjoyed by
Baring from the Louisiana Purchase and the aggressive investment by Baring
Brothers in slave-produced cotton in the 1820s.
15
1.4) Slavery-related symbolism and design at Northington Grange
The landscaping of the Grange had little in common with the spatial
structures of export-orientated slave plantations in the Caribbean. 10 The
presence of John Ellis at the Grange in the mid-eighteenth century raises the
possibility that there may have been some tropical influence in planting at the
Grange during this period. Baring’s conservatory in the mid-1820s did include
some plants from the Americas but this was not the focus of its collection.
Both Wilkins and Cockerell in seeking to authenticate their construction of
the Greek Revival exterior of the Grange used interior friezes that invoked the
classical world. Wilkins recognized that slavery and servitude were central to the
social structure of ancient Greece and so where slavery-related symbolism
appears in the Grange it references the classical form rather the Atlantic world.
2) The Henley family and the construction of Northington Grange
In 1662, the Grange Estate in Hampshire was purchased by Sir Robert
Henley (c1624-1692). Three years earlier Henley had funded the construction of
10
Barry Higman, “The Spatial Economy of Jamaican Sugar Plantations: Cartographic
Evidence from the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries”, Journal of Historical Geography,
13 (1987), pp. 17-39; Theresa A. Singleton, “Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on Cuban
Coffee Plantations”, World Archaeology, 33: 1 (2001), pp. 98-114.
16
several houses on the south side of Lincoln’s Inn Field in London. 11 These urban
and rural properties symbolized Henley’s position as country gentleman and
successful lawyer. He had inherited substantial wealth and property with the
death of his father Robert Henley (1591-1656) who had been Master of the
King’s Bench and had owned the Jacobean mansion of Bramshill, Hampshire. 12
Bramshill House, Bramshill, Hampshire (1928)
Source: English Heritage.NMR (Ref: CC000294)
11
W. Edward Riley and Sir Laurence Gomme, eds., Survey of London, Vol 3: St Giles-inthe-Fields, pt I: Lincoln's Inn Fields, (1912), p. 35.
12
Nicholas Ferrer, Cheney Culpeper, David R. Ransome, Michael J. Braddick,
Seventeenth-Century Political and Financial Papers, Vol 33, (New York: Cambridge
University Press. 1996), p. 456 f27.
17
In the same year as purchasing the Grange, Henley was appointed
Prothonotary of the King’s Bench and in 1663 was knighted. Between 1665 and
1673, a new house was built by Henley at the Grange, designed by fellow lawyer
William Samwell. Built of red brick with five floors, Samwell’s design was marked
by a double-heighted entrance hall and a great staircase made of oak. 13
In 1679 Henley was elected to Parliament as MP for Andover where he
was a prominent speaker in legislation on deer stealing and criticised the East
India Company. In December 1691, Henley spoke against a bill to register
servants travelling to Britain’s colonies in the Americas, arguing that “this bill
presents to prevent kidnapping, but if this passes into a law it will establish
kidnapping by a law”. 14 In the same month, he was part of a committee that
heard the protest of Caribbean merchants and planters seeking a reduction in the
import duty on rum. 15
Despite his extensive landholdings, Sir Robert Henley’s will of 1692 makes
no mention of property ownership in Britain’s slave colonies nor of investments in
slave trading. 16 Therefore it seems unlikely that slave-related income played a
significant role in the early development of the Grange by the Henley family.
13
John Redmill, “A House Ahead of its Time: The Grange, Hampshire”, Country Life, 8
May 1975, pp.1166-1168.
14
Henley, Robert, A Memoir of the Life of Robert Henley, Earl of Northington (London:
John Murray, 1831), p. 6.
15
First Parliament of William III and Mary II: third session (22 October 1691 - 24
February 1692), 17 December 1691, p. 592
16
National Archives, PROB 11/413 Will of Sir Robert Henley of Northington, Hampshire
18
After Sir Robert’s death in 1692, the Grange passed to his son Anthony
Henley (dc.1711) who from 1698 was MP for Andover, and then for Weymouth
and Melcombe Regis. Two of Anthony’s sons also followed him into Parliament,
Anthony Henley (dc.1745) and Robert Henley (c.1708–1772). The latter
succeeded his brother at the Grange around the same time that he became MP
for Bath (1747-1757). From 1757 to 1762 Robert Henley served as Attorney
General in the Pitt and Bute governments. This was during the Seven Years’ War
(1756-1763) where military victories against France laid the foundations for a
new phase of colonial expansion by Britain in the Americas and South Asia. 17
Pitt’s government targeted the island colonies of the French Caribbean as
a way of directly undermining France’s economy through disrupting her trade. 18
By the end of the Seven Years’ War Britain occupied the French islands of
Martinique and Guadeloupe which together contained approximately 140,000
slaves of African descent. 19 There was considerable public debate at the end of
the conflict over whether given the profits of slavery these Caribbean territories
should be retained by Britain in exchange for territories in Canada being offered
to France. While these islands were ultimately returned to France, the Treaty of
Paris in 1763 not only extended the borders of British settlements on the
17
Vincent T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763-1793 (London:
Longmans, Green, 1952); , C. A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the
World, 1780-1830 (London: Longman, London: 1989)
18
Richard Middleton. The Bells of Victory: The Pitt-Newcastle Ministry and Conduct of
the Seven Years' War 1757-1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p.
211.
19
David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental
Change since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 320.
19
American mainland, but Britain secured her sovereignty over the emerging slave
colonies of Grenada, Saint Vincent, Dominica, and Tobago. These new territories
of the Ceded Islands became the focus for the intensifying trans-Atlantic slave
trade as their relatively uncultivated lands were claimed for plantation production.
The social and economic transformation caused by the British conquest of
the Ceded Islands is reflected in the significant changes to the ratio of free and
enslaved people in their populations. Grenada which had the most developed
plantation system of these territories had a population of 13,426 in 1753, of
whom there were 9.5 slaves for every white inhabitant. By 1771 the number of
slaves on the island had more than doubled, resulting in 15 slaves per white
inhabitant. In Dominica in 1763 it was estimated that there were under 6,000
slaves, however by 1773 this had tripled to 18,700. Similarly in St Vincent, the
number of slaves tripled from 3,400 in 1763 to 11,853 in 1787. 20 Henley therefore
served in governments which radically extended the geography of African slavery
within the British Americas.
Table 1: Slave imports to British Caribbean, 1751-1800
Ceded Islands Leeward Islands
Barbados
Jamaica
1751-1775
118,470
98,783
75,338
204,788
1776-1800
189,099
126,105
107,518
260,260
Source: “The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”, www.slavevoyages.org
20
Ibid, p. 316.
20
Knighted in 1756, Robert Henley became Lord Henley in 1760 so that he
could preside at the murder trial of Lord Ferrers (in which the defendant was
sentenced to execution). 21 With the accession of George III, Henley was granted
the position of Lord Chancellor in 1761 and in 1764 became the Earl of
Northington. 22
3) Shanley v. Harvey
As Lord Chancellor, Henley presided over the case of Shanley v. Harvey
in mid-March 1762. Edward Shanley was an Irish merchant who around 1750
had presented an eight year old black boy as a gift to his niece Margaret
Hamilton. The boy was purchased by Shanley as a slave in the North African port
of Algiers and was named as Joseph Harvey. On her deathbed in early July
1759, Margaret informally manumitted Harvey telling him,
Here, take this, there is £700 or £800 in bank notes, and some more in
money, but I cannot directly tell what, but it is all for you, to make you
happy: make haste, put it in your pocket, tell nobody, and pay the
butcher’s bill. 23
21
In 1765 Henley also presided at the murder trial of Lord Byron.
Robert Henley, A Memoir of the Life of Robert Henley, Earl of Northington, Lord High
Chancellor of Great Britain (London: J. Murray, 1831)
23
National Archives, C12/1853/23, Shanley v. Harvey
22
21
The passage is striking for simultaneously containing both the master’s gift of
freedom and a menial errand. As the administrator of Hamilton’s estate which
was estimated at £3,000, Shanley sued Harvey to recover the monies given at
manumission and sought a determination of the effects of the estate (which could
have potentially included Harvey). The case reveals much about the nature of
slavery in Georgian England, as Harvey was threatened with re-enslavement not
based on his personal relationship to his former owner (Shanley) but rather on
whether he could be included as part of the construction of property in Hamilton’s
estate.
.
In countering Shanley’s claims, Harvey identified himself as “a Negro” who
“was a slave”. He remembered little of his arrival in England in 1750. Two years
after Hamilton had received him as her slave, she had Harvey baptisted as a
Christian. Harvey described how Hamilton,
chose to be attended by him than any of her other Servants so that he for
several years before her death was almost in constant attendance on her
person. 24
Jacob Gofsett, who acted as a trustee for Harvey described him as “being well
respected in the Neighbourhood of Paddington for being a very sober, civil
man”. 25
24
25
Ibid
Ibid
22
Henley dismissed Shanley’s claims which had been supported by the
Attorney-General. In his judgment in favour of Harvey, the Lord Chancellor stated
that,
As soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free: a negro may
maintain an action against his master for ill usage, and may have a
Habeas Corpus if restrained of his liberty. 26
Henley’s ruling implied a clear geographical division between the legal regime of
Britain and the laws regulating slavery in its colonies of the New World. Such a
judgment should have been strongly opposed by the West India interest of
absentee planters and merchants in London, however it appears that this Court
of Chancery case was relatively unknown either by the colonial lobby or fellow
jurists. 27
In 1772, in the case of Somerset v. Stewart, Lord Mansfield granted a writ
of habeas corpus to James Somerset, an African-born former slave who was
about to be transported to Jamaica to be returned slavery. Rather than follow the
precedent of the decade old Shanley v. Harvey, Mansfield justified his decision
based on natural law. Mansfield and Henley had been schooled at Westminster
together and were contemporaries at the bar. 28 Despite such connections,
Mansfield seems to have ignored Henley’s judgment, arguing that “the case of
Somerset is the only one on this subject”, that his ruling only applied to the
26
English Report Nº 39 - Shanley v Harvey (1762) 2 Eden 126.
William M. Wiecek, “Somerset: Lord Mansfield and the Legitimacy of Slavery in the
Anglo-American World”, University of Chicago Law Review 42:1 (1974), p. 95; Henley, A
memoir of the life of Robert Henley, p. 55.
28
Henley, A Memoir of the Life of Robert Henley, pp. 10-11.
27
23
forcible removal of a slave overseas from Britain and that it did not affect the
relationship between master and slave. 29 In contrast, Henley’s judgment in
Shanley v. Harvey was far more expansive implying that it was the slave’s arrival
in Britain rather than their departure which provided grounds for manumission,
and that the law could directly intervene in the economic relationship of masterslave. Yet despite Mansfield’s efforts to avoid a broad judgment during the
Somerset case, and his efforts to limit its implications afterwards, the increasing
strength of the abolitionist movement in the 1770s meant that it was his more
conservative judgment that came to be seen as defining African slavery as
antithetical to English liberty.
4) John Ellis and colonial botany
Robert Henley’s accession to the position of Lord Chancellor in 1761
paralleled a significant period for the planting and landscaping of the Grange.
Isaac Taylor, A Map of Hampshire (1759) reveals the lime avenue that led to the
entrance of the house built by Samwell. In 1764, Henley transformed the estate,
designing “a naturalistic landscape, complete with sinuous lake and ruined
folly”. 30 After the damming of the River Candover to create the ornamental lake, a
visitor to the Grange in 1788 wrote that “the water below the house on the right,
29
Wiecek, “Somerset”, p. 109.
J. Mordaunt Crook, “Grange Park Transformed” in Howard Colvin and John Harris,
eds., The Country Seat: Studies in the History of the British Court House (London: Allen
Lane, 1970), p. 220.
30
24
which runs entirely through the grounds, is eminently beautiful”. 31 They also
noted that the grounds “which are beautifully laid out, and are not deficient in
wood, though it seems principally of modern growth”. 32
Henley’s strong botanical interests brought him into contact with John
Ellis, a London-based merchant in the Irish linen trade. Ellis was a prolific author
and seen by Swedish ecologist Carl Linnaneus (1707-1788) as one of England’s
leading botanists. In 1754, Ellis was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society, and
maintained an energetic correspondence over tropical produce with naturalists in
Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean and North America.
Lord Northington has been seen as the key patron who sponsored the
appointment of Ellis as the colonial agent for the British colonies of West Florida
in April 1764 and for Dominica in 1773. 33 In late 1764, Ellis wrote of his
relationship with Northington,
I spend a good deal of my time with him in the Country and am often a
visitor of his plantations there by his order when he himself is imployed in
the publick Service in London. 34
31
“The Grange: Summary of the Historical Review of the Gardens and Parks” (London:
Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission, 1987), p. 1; Gentleman's Magazine,
58:4 (1788), p.872.
32
Gentleman's Magazine, 58:4 (1788), p.872.
33
Roy A. Rauschenberg, “John Ellis, FRS: Eighteenth-century naturalist and royal agent
to West Florida”, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 32: 2 (1978), p 161.
34
Julius Groner and Robert R. Rea, “John Ellis, King’s agent and West Florida”, Florida
Historical Quarterly, 66: 4 (1988), p. 388.
25
The passage suggests that Ellis regularly assisted in the agricultural
management of the Grange in Northington’s absence. Ellis was also credited with
aiding in the construction of a conservatory at the Grange. 35 The conservatory or
extensive kitchen gardens may have held some exotic plants, but it seems
unlikely that the park was directly shaped by Ellis’s interests in the agriculture of
the New World. Both the 1788 entry in the Gentleman’s Magazine and the 1795
inventory of the estate suggest that its plantings and design differed little from
others in Hampshire. 36
John Ellis was a strong advocate of developing colonial economies
through the transplanting of different exotic crops across empire. In 1760 Ellis
sent samples of tea seed to the Governor of Jamaica and to Carl Linnaneus in
Sweden, although his shipment did not reach the Caribbean colony. 37 In seeking
to promote the tropical exports of West Florida when he was serving as agent for
the colony, Ellis published a paper comparing Asian and American varieties of
star anise which described the discovery of the latter by a slave owned by
William Clifton, the colony’s Chief Justice. 38
In 1772, Ellis published The Historical Account of Coffee to lobby for
reduction of the import tariff on coffee as a means of stimulating economic
development in Dominica. The enslaved are barely visible in Ellis’s account
35
Roy A. Rauschenberg, “John Ellis, royal agent for West Florida”, Florida Historical
Quarterly, 62: 1 (1983), p. 3.
36
Geddes, “The Grange, Northington”, p. 42.
37
Rauschenberg, “John Ellis, royal agent for West Florida”, p. 15.
38
Rauschenberg, “John Ellis, FRS”, pp. 158-159
26
which was intended to encourage British consumption of coffee and consisted of
correspondence addressed to him from the colony and extracts from other
publications on the superiority of Caribbean coffee to Chinese tea. The
descriptions of how coffee was grown do not mention slave labour. It is only in
the final section of the book that seeks to show how plantation expansion in
Dominica will benefit manufacturers in Britain, does Ellis mention the following in
a long list of essential imports for the colony:
An immense Quality of Printed Cottons and Callicoes, and Linen, for
Gowns, Night-Gowns, and Petticoats for House Negroes, and White
People; Handkerchiefs, of which a great deal for Negroe Women’s
heads…
Checks, for clothing the field Negroes,
Jackets for the Men
)
Petticoats for the Women ) in coarse Woollen
In great quantities. 39
Such commodities were in great demand as imports of enslaved Africans to the
island peaked in the mid-1770s. Ellis’s appointment as lobbyist for the colony
was therefore profoundly marked by Dominica’s intensifying slave economy.
39
John Ellis, An Historical Account of Coffee (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1774),
p. 63.
27
Figure 1: Annual Slave Imports to Dominica, 1764-1799
9000
8000
7000
6000
5000
4000
3000
2000
1000
99
17
93
97
17
17
91
17
17
89
87
17
85
17
83
17
76
78
17
17
74
17
72
17
70
17
68
17
66
17
17
64
0
Source: www.slavevoyages.org
Also during this period, Ellis published A description of the mangostan and
the bread-fruit (1775) addressed to the Earl of Sandwich as Lord of the Admiralty
and describing the means to transplant the mangosteen and breadfruit to the
Caribbean. Ellis wrote that,
The Bread-fruit affords a most necessary and pleasant article of
subsistence to many. This, likewise, might be easily cultivated in our West
India islands, and made to supply an important article of food to all ranks
of their inhabitants, especially to the Negroes. 40
Ellis was writing before the subsistence crises of the late 1770s that spread
across the British Caribbean during the American Revolution. In Jamaica in 1776,
40
John Ellis, A Description of the Mangostan and the Bread-fruit: The First, Esteemed
one of the most Delicious; the other, the most Useful of all the Fruits (London, 1775), p.
11
28
the food shortages were so intense they were described by contemporaries as a
“famine” and blamed for an attempted insurrection by slaves in July 1776. 41
To combat malnutrition, the ackee tree was introduced in the British
Caribbean from West Africa in 1778, the mango in 1782 and the breadfruit in
1793 (after William Bligh’s first attempt in 1787 on the Bounty had resulted in the
mutiny of his crew). 42 Initially, slaves resisted eating breadfruit which they saw as
pig food, but during the decades that preceded emancipation in 1834, the
provision grounds on which the enslaved grew these crops to feed themselves
became an important arena of autonomy within the constraints of slavery. Ellis’s
vision of the global transfer of plants to support plantation projects in the
Americas eventually resulted in a “proto-peasantry” who despite the constraints
of slavery were able to sell their produce in markets across the islands,
pioneering the marketing systems that have remained so visible in Caribbean
life. 43
5) Provisioning empire: The Drummond family
In 1787, the 3,066 acres of the Grange were bought by Henry Drummond
(c.1730–1795). The estate was estimated as having an annual income of £1251,
41
Richard B. Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence in the British West Indies during
and after the American Revolution”, William and Mary Quarterly 33: 4 (1976), p 622.
42
Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence”, p. 634; John H. Parry, “Plantation and
Provision Ground: An Historical Sketch of the Introduction of Food Crops into Jamaica”,
Revista de Historia de América, 39 (1955), pp. 17-18.
43
Mary Turner, From Chattel Slaves to Wage Slaves: The Dynamics of Labour
Bargaining in the Americas (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1995)
29
and the main house was described as having a “noble and regular structure”. 44
The purchase of the Grange symbolized Henry Drummond’s rise to become part
of Britain’s landed elite. His career in finance had begun at the age of nineteen in
his uncle’s London bank in 1749, which was three years after his father’s death
leading Jacobite forces at the battle of Culloden. During the Seven Years’ War
Henry found it profitable to work as an agent for various British regiments,
culminating in 1770 when he replaced his cousin John Drummond as the holder
of the contract to pay British Forces in North America.
In 1772, Henry Drummond became a partner in the family’s banking
business while also serving as a contractor to the Treasury as Paymaster to His
Majesty’s Forces in North America. He was responsible for transferring specie
across the Atlantic, on which he could profit from commission and charges.
Drummond’s profits during the increasing military expenditure of the American
Revolution led one of his contemporaries to label this as “one of the best
contracts that man ever had”. 45 Although in 1778, Henry was threatened by the
Treasury with the removal of the contract, through political patronage it was
subsequently extended to 1783 covering the British army on the American
mainland and in the West Indies. The monies remitted by the Drummonds to the
Americas came at a time when the British army were directly engaging with
slavery as both a strategic military resource and a potential danger to the colonial
order.
44
44 M 69/E22/1/1/1, 1787 Particulars of the Grange Estates
Hector Bolitho and Derek Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1967), p. 59.
45
30
As Governor of Virginia in 1775, the Earl of Dunmore had offered
American slaves freedom to fight for the British army. However, this policy was
an ambivalent and qualified emancipation for the same army also sought to
protect the enslaved property of Britain’s Loyalist supporters on the American
mainland and in the Caribbean. The precarious status of those who claimed their
freedom during the chaotic events of the American Revolution is perhaps best
revealed by the life history of George Liele. Born in Virginia, Liele had been a
slave for over forty years, when his Loyalist owner was killed during the war.
Following the British army through Georgia, Liele continued the Baptist preaching
and petty trading he had engaged in as a slave. 46 When he was threatened with
re-enslavement, Liele was protected by white patrons who he then followed to
Jamaica in 1783, indenturing himself as a servant to bring his wife and four
children to the island.
In Jamaica, Liele and another black refugee from America, Moses Baker,
were able to successfully establish black Baptist churches with the support of
several white Loyalists. Baptist preaching was driven underground in Jamaica
during the revolutionary 1790s when both Liele and Baker were arrested. While
repression intensified African and Creole influences in Baptist religious practices,
they were also affected by the arrival of British missionaries in Jamaica from
46
Thomas J. Little, “George Liele and the Rise of the Independent Black Baptist
Churches in the Lower South and Jamaica”, Slavery and Abolition, 16: 2 (1995), pp.
188-204.
31
1814. 47 This creolized religious vision played a profound role in shaping the
leadership and organization of the 1831-32 slave uprising in western Jamaica
which was also known as the Baptist war.
Elsewhere the British army assisted in the removal of thousands of slaves
at the end of the American Revolution as both soldiers and civilians sought to
profit from their movable capital. Alongside these large consignments of slaves
there were also smaller groups of free blacks who travelled to the Bahamas and
Britain in an effort to maintain their free status.
Most strikingly on the island of Abaco in the Bahamas, the free status of
almost a hundred newly-arrived black refugees became imperiled in 1784 when
650 plantation slaves were transferred from East Florida, although these were
eventually relocated to establish cotton estates on the largely uninhabited
southern islands of the Bahamas. The Earl of Dunmore who a decade earlier had
endorsed emancipation as a military measure, now sought to limit such claims to
freedom as Governor of the Bahamas. This triggered an armed revolt by black
Loyalists on Abaco, many of whom were then re-enslaved. 48
47
Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
48
Michael Craton and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream, Vol 1 (Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 1999), pp. 182-187; Michael Craton, “Loyalists Mainly to Themselves:
the 'Black Loyalist' diaspora to the Bahamas, 1783-c.1820” in Verene A. Shepherd, ed.,
Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the
African Diaspora (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 46-49.
32
Table 2: Destinations of Loyalist Refugees from East Florida, 1785
Destination
White Refugees
Black Refugees
Ratio of Black to
White Refugees
Jamaica/Honduras
196
714
3.64
Dominica
225
444
1.97
Bahamas
1,033
2,214
2.14
US
462
2,561
5.54
Nova Scotia
725
155
0.21
Europe
246
35
0.14
61
217
3.56
450
200
0.44
3,398
6,540
1.92
Other Destinations
Remained in
Florida
Total
Source: Carole Watterson Troxler, “Loyalist Refugees and the British Evacuation
of East Florida, 1783-1785” (1981), p. 21.
At the same time as the American Revolution brought high profits to Henry
Drummond’s military contracting, so the British army became more significant in
the Caribbean in suppressing slave dissent. 49 While the same army provided
small bands of former slaves with a route to freedom, overall it was committed to
maintaining the existing structure of empire, which also entailed enforcing
slavery.
49
Sheridan, “The Crisis of Slave Subsistence“, pp. 615-641.
33
During this period Drummonds’ bank increasingly provided loans to
George III and his supporters. 50 This wealth funded not only purchase of the
Grange but also Henry Drummond’s political career beginning in 1774 when he
became a Member of Parliament through purchasing the seat of Wendover in
Buckinghamshire.
Henry Drummond’s experience of the high profitability of supplying
services to the British military at times of war was paralleled by the fortune built
by merchant Henry Lascelles (1690-1753), whose family constructed Harewood
House in West Yorkshire six years after his death. Lascelles claimed that the
basis for his wealth had been his contracts for providing victuals to the Royal
Navy in Barbados, the Leeward Islands and the Bahamas during the 1730s and
1740s. Lascelles’s ships carried not only provisions to support the navy, but also
enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and slave-produced commodities to the
metropole. Over time, the profits from these activities were invested in land in
Britain and plantation ownership in the Caribbean. 51 Lascelles held an account
with Drummonds Bank, as did several other West Indian planters. 52
50
Ian R. Christie, “George III and the Debt on Lord North's Election Account, 17801784”, English Historical Review, 78: 309 (1963), pp. 715-724
51
Simon Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World
of the Lascelles, 1648-1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 73-74
Douglas Hamilton, “Private enterprise and public service: naval contracting in the
Caribbean, 1720–50”, Journal for Maritime Research (April 2004)
52
Smith, Slavery, Family and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic, p. 446
34
Figure 2: Distributed Profits of Messrs Drummond, 1777-1820
90000
80000
70000
60000
50000
40000
30000
20000
10000
17
77
17
79
17
81
17
83
17
85
17
87
17
89
17
91
17
93
17
95
17
97
17
99
18
01
18
03
18
05
18
07
18
09
18
11
18
13
18
15
18
17
18
19
0
Source: Hector Bolitho and Derek Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross
(1967), pp. 212-213
As shown in the above figure, Henry Drummond purchased the Grange in
1787 in the wake of the extreme profits of the American Revolution. The 1790s
were marked by declining returns for the banks’ partners and with Henry
Drummond’s death in 1795 the Grange was leased to cover the family’s debts. 53
6) The Prince of Wales at the Grange
Between 1795 and 1800 the Grange was rented by the Prince of Wales
(1762–1830), the future George IV. The Prince had been painted accompanied
by a black servant in 1786 by Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792), and the portrait
53
Bolitho and Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross, p. 132.
35
had been prominently displayed at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1787. Some
observers argued that the black figure symbolised the Prince’s precarious
finances, expressing how in London at this time black refugees from the
American Revolution had generated intensifying concerns about the black poor. 54
Whether this unnamed servant was still in the Prince’s service a decade later and
followed him to Northington Grange requires further research. He may be listed in
either the 1795 household accounts held by the Royal Archives or the 1795
establishment book held by the British Library.
Table 3: Portraits with black servants by Joshua Reynolds
Pages
Grooms
Domestics
1740s
Paul Henry Ourry
(c.1748)
1750s
1760s
John Manners
(c.1763)
Elizabeth Keppel
(1761)
Frederick, Count of
Schaumburg –Lippe
(c.1764)
1770s
1780s
George Grenville
(1780)
Charles Stanhope
(1782)
Prince George
(1786)
54
Mary Beth Norton, “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution”,
Journal of Negro History, 58: 4 (1973), pp. 406-407.
36
Reynolds painted at least a half a dozen other paintings that included
black servants, from young child pages to teenage male grooms attending to
their master’s horses, a female domestic and perhaps most strikingly the portrait
of Francis Barber (c.1735–1801), the Jamaican-born adult servant of Samuel
Johnson.
The Prince of Wales also collected several paintings that featured
servants of African descent. Between 1802 and 1806, he acquired “A groom
assisting a riding master at the Manège” (c.1686-7) painted by the Dutch artist
Melchior de Hondecoeter (1636-95) where the central foreground of the work
focused on a teenage black groom leading a white Spanish horse as it is being
trained. 55 In 1814, Prince George obtained the “The Neglected Lute” (c.1708) by
Willem van Mieris (1662-1747) depicting a domestic scene of seduction with a
black servant serving oysters in the background. 56
The Prince was also close to the English miniaturist Richard Cosway
(1742–1821), who he appointed as his official painter in 1785. The year before,
the Cosways had employed Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (b.c.1757) as servant.
Cugoano was born in Ghana as a member of the Fanti nation. Aged thirteen he
was enslaved and sent to Grenada where he stayed for nine months before
being taken to England. He became a prominent anti-slavery campaigner,
55
56
RCIN 405957 at http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/
RCIN 405543 at http://www.royalcollection.org.uk/
37
collaborating with Olaudah Equiano, and in 1787 printed an account of his
enslavement to support the abolitionist cause. 57 Cugoano’s text was initially
published by Thomas Becket, “bookseller to Prince of Wales”, and the Prince
headed the list of subscribers to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah
Equiano published in 1789
58
In the same year that the Prince of Wales began leasing Northington
Grange, a sixteen year old mixed-race musician became the principal violinist in
the Prince’s chamber orchestra. George Bridgetower (1779-1860) was born in
Poland, and made his professional debut at the age of ten with public concerts in
Paris and Bath. Bridgetower’s father, Friedrich Augustus served as a personal
page to Prince Nicholas Esterházy in eastern Austria during the 1780s where he
was identified as a Moor or African prince. However the elder Bridetower seems
to have deliberately chosen his surname to express his Caribbean origin, for in
his own words he was a “Bridgetower of Bridgetown, from the English colony of
Barbados”. 59 That such a surname isn’t recorded in Barbados suggests that
Friedrich Bridgetower had created a new identity in crossing the Atlantic, leaving
an island where he had either been enslaved or because of his mixed AfricanEuropean ancestry a free person of colour.
57
Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the
Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London: 1787)
58
Vincent Carretta, “’Property of Author’: Olaudah Equiano’s Place in the History of the
Book” in Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage: Literature of the
early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), n3, p. 145.
59
Josephine Wright, “George Polgreen Bridgetower: An African Prodigy in England
1789–99”, Musical Quarterly, 66 (1980), p. 69.
38
Prince George had been an early supporter of the teen virtuoso and in
1791 became more than a patron to George Bridgetower when the twelve year
old broke from his father and ran away to the Prince’s Carlton House. With the
Prince sponsoring his education, Bridgetower enjoyed an extremely distinguished
musical career, performing with Haydn and Beethoven. The latter initially
dedicated his Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 9 in A Minor, Op. 47 to
Bridgetower, although it is now known as the Kreutzer Sonata.
6) Defending slavery: Henry Dundas
When Henry Drummond died in 1795, Northington Grange passed to his
grandson, Henry Drummond (1786-1860) as his oldest son had died the previous
year. Neither the will of the grandfather nor that of the father, Henry Drummond
(1762–1794), mentioned slavery-related property. 60 With the estate leased out
until he came of age, Henry Drummond came under the care of his grandfather,
Henry Dundas, as his mother Anne remarried and emigrated to India in 1802. 61
During this period, Drummond attended Harrow School while Dundas was a
leading figure in the Cabinet throughout the 1790s.
60
National Archives, PROB 11/1263 Will of Henry Drummond of Saint James
Westminster , Middlesex; National Archives, PROB 11/1248 Will of Henry Drummond of
Saint Martin in the Fields , Middlesex
61
Bolitho and Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross, p.135, Jane Geddes, “The
Prince of Wales at the Grange, Northington: An inventory of 1795”, Furniture History, 22
(1986), p. 177.
39
Figure 3: Genealogy of the Drummond Family
Henry Drummond
(c1730-1795)
+
Elizabeth Compton
Henry Dundas
(1742-1811)
1st Viscount Melville
+
Elizabeth Rennie
Henry Drummond
(1762-1794)
+
Anne Dundas
Henry Drummond
(1786-1860)
+
Henrietta Hay-Drummond
(1783-1854)
Born into one of Scotland’s leading legal families, Henry Dundas
dominated British politics and patronage at the end of the eighteenth century. At
the age of twenty-four in 1766, Dundas was appointed solicitor-general for
Scotland and by the age of thirty-two had been elected to the House of
Commons. He served in Parliament for thirty-one years before being forced to
resign in 1805 on charges of mismanagement of public funds. During his career,
Dundas intervened as a lawyer, a politician and a minister in debates over
slavery although over time his stance shifted from an opponent to a defender of
pro-slavery interests.
40
Joseph Knight had been born in Africa around 1750 and at the age of ten
had been enslaved, carried across the Atlantic where he was sold in Jamaica to
John Wedderburn, a Jacobite exile from the repression that followed the battle of
Culloden. In 1768 Wedderburn returned to Scotland and was accompanied by
Knight as his personal servant. They settled in Ballendean on the eastern coast
of Scotland, halfway between Perth and Dundee where Knight was baptized and
married a fellow servant. When his wife and child were faced with moving away
from Ballendean, Knight sought to join them but was prevented by Wedderburn
who obtained a warrant for his detention from the local justices of peace. Knight
appealed to the sheriff of Perthshire who in 1774 found,
That the state of slavery is not recognized by the laws of this kingdom, and
is inconsistent with the principles thereof; that the regulations in Jamaica,
concerning slaves, do not extend to this kingdom; and repelled the
defender's claim to a perpetual service. 62
The case of Knight v Wedderburn (1778) was taken to the Court of
Sessions, where Dundas strongly argued that that slavery was incompatible with
Scottish law. James Boswell also participated in the defense of Knight’s right to
freedom, remembering
… I cannot too highly praise the speech which Mr. Henry Dundas
generously contributed to the cause of the sooty stranger. Mr. Dundas's
62
http://www.nas.gov.uk/about/071022.asp
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/rights/transcripts/somerset_ca
se.htm
41
Scottish accent, which has been so often in vain obtruded as an objection
to his powerful abilities in parliament, was no disadvantage to him in his
own country. And I do declare, that upon this memorable question he
impressed me, and I believe all his audience, with such feelings as were
produced by some of the most eminent orations of antiquity. This
testimony I liberally give to the excellence of an old friend, with whom it
has been my lot to differ very widely upon many political topicks; yet I
persuade myself without malice. 63
With the majority of the Court of Sessions following Mansfield’s judgment in
Somerset, Knight’s case represented a striking opportunity for the ambitious
Dundas to build his public reputation.
For the distinguished historian of British abolition, Roger Anstey, the
period 1787 to 1796 was marked by intensifying mobilization of popular
petitioning and the organization of a core group of abolitionist MPs in the House
of Commons. Against this momentum, Anstey writes that
Abolitionists were right to acknowledge Dundas, as in effect they did, as
the most important cause of the failure of immediate abolition in the
Commons in the period up to 1796. 64
63
James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman's (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1904) p. 886
64
Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810 (London:
Macmillan, 1975), p. 315.
42
At a time of war, Dundas argued that immediate abolition of the slave trade would
undermine the national interest and threatened the collapse of Britain’s
colonies. 65
Such opposition was difficult for abolitionists to counter, given that in
speaking against Wilberforce’s motion for an immediate abolition of the transAtlantic slave trade at the start of April 1792, Dundas described himself as
personally committed to abolition but differing with Wilberforce over the means by
which it was to be achieved. 66 He stated before Parliament that he was agreed
with Wilberforce,
that the African trade was not founded in policy; that the continuation of it
was not essential to the preservation and continuation of our trade with the
West India islands. 67
However, immediate abolition would result in disorder and potentially a revolution
as had occurred with the slave insurrection in French Saint Domingue during
August 1791. Instead Dundas argued that the abolition of slavery was best
achieved over a prolonged period of time through colonial legislatures enacting
local regulations to encourage the natural increase and education of their slave
populations.
65
Ibid, p. 312 and 314
Seventeenth Parliament of Great Britain: Second Session (31 January 1792 - 15 June
1792) 2 April 1792, p. 222
67
Ibid, p. 223
66
43
It was not only the oratory of Dundas that made his intervention so
significant in April 1792, but he also exercised powerful patronage over a large
number of Scottish Members of Parliament. His motion “That the slave trade
ought to be gradually abolished” was carried 230 votes to 85 against.
Significantly, the delaying of abolitionist projects had little appeal for some proslavery lobbyists such as Stephen Fuller, who as Agent for Jamaica believed that
Wilberforce’s 1792 motion would have been easily defeated. To Fuller, Dundas’s
gradualist motion perpetuated the debate over slavery when those who
supported the West India lobby of planters and merchants had the opportunity to
close off such discussions through a clear vote rejecting abolition. 68
In mid-June 1804 as William Wilberforce was preparing to introduce
another motion for the immediate abolition of the slave trade he wrote to Dundas
seeking his support. Wilberforce wrote that
Having from almost the commencement of my public life, been honoured
in your friendly regard, having felt for you some corresponding sensations,
it has long been a matter of great pain to me that in the grand object of
Parliamentary Existence, you should have been the person to oppose and
defeat my wishes. 69
He offered to meet with Dundas to discuss the bill for abolition at any
convenient time. Most strikingly, Wilberforce also used the pragmatic arguments
that Dundas had employed in his gradualist opposition to abolition. Wilberforce
68
69
Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, pp. 430-431
National Archives of Scotland, GD 51/1/435 Wilberforce to Dundas, 13/6/1804
44
wrote that Britain’s Caribbean islands were now saturated with slaves while the
acquisition of new slave colonies during wars of the late 1790s and early 1800s
represented a real threat to Britain’s old established colonies. 70 Dundas’s
gradualist obstruction to abolitionist campaigning therefore helped to reshape
abolitionist discourse, in which the end of slavery was recast as serving the
national interest.
From 1794 to 1801 Dundas was secretary of state for war during which
time he supported the large-scale invasion of the Caribbean to claim France’s
slave colonies of Saint Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe. Before the
uprising of August 1791 by slaves in Saint Domingue, the colony had been one of
the most profitable in the world. In 1790 alone over 40,000 African slaves were
brought to the colony and it was estimated that there were half a million slaves
working within its borders. 71 Lobbied to intervene in Saint Domingue by French
planters exiled by the revolutions in both the Caribbean and Paris, Dundas and
Pitt committed to a large scale invasion of the Caribbean by British forces. The
decision to intervene in the Caribbean, seems to have been motivated as much
for financial gain as it was for strategic advantage.
During the second half of 1793, Dundas was the lead figure in organizing
what became one of Britain’s largest military expedition sent overseas. Thirty
thousand men and two hundred vessels were dispatched across the Atlantic,
70
71
Ibid
http://www.slavevoyages.org
45
initially to conquer and secure the smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean,
however after delays in their passage the focus shifted to invading French Saint
Domingue. As David Geggus argues,
To depict Pitt and Dundas as engaged in a headlong, purposeful pursuit of
Caribbean spoils and la perle des Antilles in particular, is a little
misleading. Although within a deeply divided Cabinet, proponents of an
aggressive West India policy predominated, primacy was always accorded
to the war in Europe. 72
Dundas was extremely pragmatic in responding to the opportunities of war, and
initially the policy seemed justified as within eight months of the invasion British
forces occupied a third of Saint Domingue.
June 1794 represented the high water mark of British occupation. Soon
British forces in Saint Domingue were decimated by yellow fever resulting in an
estimated 9,000 deaths. Such heavy mortality forced Britain to increasingly use
enslaved Africans as soldiers, despite the strong fears from white colonial elites
across the Caribbean. As the new nation of Haiti moved towards independence
in 1804, the surviving British forces claimed new colonies in Spanish Trinidad
and Dutch Demerera and Berbice to expand Britain’s empire and escalate the
British slave trade.
72
David Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint
Domingue 1793-1798 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 86.
46
7) William Wilkins and the classical transformation of the Grange
After studying at Oxford for two years, Henry Drummond took possession
of the Grange in 1804 at the age of eighteen. Having toured Europe, he entered
parliament in 1810 only to resign two years later on health grounds. In 1817,
Drummond sold the Grange and travelled to Switzerland where he became a
leading supporter of the Catholic Apostolic church. In 1847, Drummond returned
to parliament and spoke in the 1848 debate over sugar duties where he criticized
both planters and abolitionists, in calling for free labour and free trade. 73
Upon reaching his maturity, Drummond commissioned architect William
Wilkins to transform the Grange into a monument to the Greek Revival. At a cost
of £30,000, the house was redesigned between 1804 and 1809 “incorporating
echoes of the Teseion and of the Choragic Monument of Thrasyllus in Athens”. 74
David Watkin describes how
Wilkins clearly valued rigour of research, exactitude in its manipulation and
the moderation of symbolism through function. 75
This combination of technical and historical knowledge resulted in Wilkins
seeking to exactly measure and replicate the key elements of ancient Greek
architecture.
73
Henry Drummond, Speeches in Parliament and some Miscellaneous Pamphlets of the
late Henry Drummond, Vol. 1, ed. Lord Lovaine (London: Bosworth and Harrison, 1860),
pp. 52-57.
74
David Watkin, “William Wilkins and the Architecture of Improvement” in The Age of
Wilkins: The Architecture of Improvement (Cambridge : Fitzwilliam Museum, 2000), p. 22
75
Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, “Deconstructing William Wilkins” in The Age of Wilkins: The
Architecture of Improvement (Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum, 2000), p. 35
47
Wilkins recognized that slavery was a core element of the classical society
which he sought to recreate. He wrote of the Peloponnesian wars in Sicily that
they were marked by the coexistence of liberty and oppression, and a range of
forms of vassalage and slavery. However, Wilkins miscast the nature of classical
slavery for he believed that it directly paralleled that of the contemporary Atlantic
with the enslaved treated as if they were private property. 76
Significantly around the same time Wilkins was completing the Grange, he
had also worked on Argyll House in London. Here he constructed a saloon
dominated by Ionic columns with a frieze by Jean-Jacques Boileau. As Rhodri
Liscombe writes of Boileau’s design,
Here was one of the first instances of the imitation of the Parthenon
Marbles, and, at this time, Wilkins may also have persuaded another
friend, Samuel Rogers, to install a copy of part of the frieze on the
staircase of his house in St James”
77
Just as the detail of the exterior at the Grange sought to legitimize it as an
authentic classical structure, so Wilkins also sought to use interior design to
authenticate their classical façades. Photographs at the end of the nineteenth
century show that ancient friezes proliferated in the Grange. As discussed later,
some of these images constructed by the architects who succeed Wilkins
76
William Wilkins, The antiquities of Magna Graecia (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1807), p. 7.
77
Rhodri Windsor Liscombe, William Wilkins 1778-1839 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1980), p. 71.
48
referenced Greek and Roman slavery, although it is unclear whether these were
part of the original design in 1809.
8) The Baring family and the trans-Atlantic slave trade
In 1984, Barings Bank aggressively expanded into Asian securities
markets resulting within a decade in record profits of £100 million and then the
collapse of the bank shortly afterwards. 78 Also in 1984, Peter Fryer argued that
the foundations of the booming firm had been significantly shaped by the transAtlantic slave trade. In Fryer’s words, Sir Francis Baring,
seems to have made his first money out of dealing in slaves when he was
only 16. It evidently gave him an excellent start in life for this ‘prince of
merchants’ earned nearly £7,000,000 over 30 years… and left property
worth £1,000,000. 79
Such a claim implies that the Baring’s family fortune had been decisively shaped
by the profits of slave trading.
Between 1755 and the end of 1762, Francis Baring had served a sevenyear apprenticeship with leading cotton merchant and manufacturer Samuel
Touchet (c.1705–1773). Although it was rare for Manchester cotton makers to
78
Peter E. Austin, Baring Brothers and the Birth of Modern Finance (London: Pickering &
Chatto, 2007), pp. 193-199.
79
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto,
1984), p. 46.
49
invest directly in the trade with Britain’s Caribbean colonies, Touchet was an
exception and in 1751 claimed that he had an interest in twenty ships sailing to
the West Indies. 80 Touchet’s father had been exporting cotton goods to the
Caribbean from 1714, and the family imported cotton produced by slaves on the
British islands as well as investing in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 81 Such
commercial connections resulted in Touchet becoming part owner of the
Dukinfield Hall plantation in Jamaica. 82
By 1747, Touchet controlled a fifth of the raw cotton imported into
England, leading to fears in the early 1750s that he was attempting to create a
monopoly in the supply of the commodity. 83 These fears re-emerged during the
Seven Years’ War, when Francis Baring was serving as a clerk in the firm, and
Touchet provided £10,223 to privately sponsor the invasion of the French colony
of Senegal in May 1758. In that year, at least twenty slaving vessels travelled to
the Senegambia, embarking 3,313 enslaved Africans, of whom almost 500 would
not survive the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. 84 As well as its slaves, ivory
and gold, Touchet sought to control the export commerce from Senegal because
it was the main source of gum needed for cotton printing in England. His attempts
to secure a seven year trading charter for Senegal were denied in 1764 and the
80
Alfred P. Wadsworth and Julia de Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial
Lancashire 1600-1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), p. 231
81
Ibid, p. 244
82
London Metropolitan Archives, Acc/0775/805-806, Agreement between Samuel
Dukinfield and Samuel Touchet, 6/12/1756
83
Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600-1780, pp.
156 & 233.
84
www.slavevoyages.org
50
colony was vested in the Royal African Company, with Touchet’s firm collapsing
into bankruptcy the year after Baring finished his apprenticeship. 85
During Baring’s time as a clerk to Touchet, the latter directly invested in
two slave vessels carrying Africans to the Caribbean. One of these ships was the
Lydia which was owned by Touchet and six other partners. 86 Leaving Liverpool in
late September 1756, the Lydia sailed to Fort William (Anomabu, Ghana) which
was a focus for British slave trading on the Gold Coast. Three hundred and forty
enslaved Africans were loaded onto the vessel, although fifty of them did not
survive the crossing to Jamaica. This is most probably the voyage invoked by
Fryer, but it is unclear to what extent Francis Baring had any direct financial
interest in the Lydia and given his position within the firm as an apprenticed clerk
it is extremely unlikely that he had invested in it.
As Francis Baring launched his own career as a merchant and banker in
his family’s firm, he followed Touchet’s example as a financier who was both a
member of Parliament and actively engaged in government contracts and
loans. 87 Baring’s name is absent from records on ownership of slaving vessels
collected by David Eltis in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, so it seems
that Fryer’s attack is in some ways misdirected. As will be shown, Baring and his
85
Wadsworth and Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600-1780, pp.
245-247.
86
www.slavevoyages.org - voyage 90647.
87
Alan J. Kidd, “Samuel Touchet” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford
University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008
51
family did derive substantial wealth from Atlantic slavery, but it was not through
slave trading.
9) The Bingham connection: Privateering in Martinique
In 1795, twenty-two year old Alexander Baring crossed the Atlantic as he
tried to carve out his own career within the family bank. His first focus was on the
acquisition of over a million acres of land in Maine, which he purchased from
Philadelphia merchant and Senator William Bingham (1752–1804). On 23 August
1798 he married Bingham’s daughter, Ann Louisa, connecting him to one of the
wealthiest families in the United States and resulting in a marriage settlement of
£20,000. Following the senator’s death six years later, Alexander and his wife
received almost a third of the income from her father’s $3 million estate. 88
Bingham’s fortune therefore significantly accelerated Alexander’s own financial
rise at a time when the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars resulted in a period of
exceptionally high profits for the House of Baring.
88
John Orbell, ‘Baring, Alexander, first Baron Ashburton (1773–1848)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, Jan 2008
52
Figure 4: Genealogy of the Baring Family
Francis Baring
(1740-1810)
+
Harriet Herring
(1750-1804)
William Bingham
(1752-1804)
+
Anne Willing
(1764-1801)
Alexander Baring
(1774-1848)
Baron Ashburton
+
Anne Bingham
(d 1848)
The foundation for William Bingham’s wealth was the four years he spent
in the French Caribbean colony of Martinique during the American War of
Independence as an agent for the Continental Congress. At the start of July
1773, Bingham had travelled to Martinique to receive armaments shipments from
France and to organise privateering attacks against British shipping in the
Caribbean. Bingham’s family had been trading in the Caribbean before the war,
and he used these networks to develop an extremely profitable trade in American
tobacco and Caribbean molasses. 89 Both these commodities were produced by
89
Margret L. Brown, “William Bingham, Agent of the Continental Congress in
Martinique”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 61:1 (1937), pp. 54-87;
53
slave labour, and Bingham also profited directly from the sale of the human
cargoes of British slave ships taken to Martinique by American privateers. After
one successful raid captured two Guinea ships, Bingham became part owner of
498 African slaves. Another capture of a British merchant ship leaving Saint
Domingue resulted in Bingham receiving £4600 for part of its cargo of coffee,
sugar, and rum. 90 The fortune acquired by Bingham during his time in the
Caribbean was fundamental to his later investments in land and in the Bank of
North America.
Given that Alexander Baring did not become a partner in Baring Brothers
until 1804, the financial resources he gained through marriage to Ann Louisa
Bingham were particularly timely. 91 In 1817 Alexander Baring acquired the
Grange for £136,000. The Caribbean origins of Ann Bingham’s wealth meant that
the family’s acquisition of Northington Grange was at least partly funded with
slave-based income.
10) State finance from Saint Domingue to the Louisiana Purchase
During the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, the House of Baring was able
to weather the uncertainties and losses experienced by global trade, by
Selwyn H.H. Carrington, The British West Indies during the American Revolution
(Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988), pp. 85-87.
90
Robert C. Alberts, The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham 17521804 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969), p. 52.
91
Ralph W. Hidy, The House of Baring in American trade and finance: English merchant
bankers at work, 1763-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), p. 38.
54
expanding its commercial activities into state finance which increased its profits
significantly during this period. 92 Before Alexander Baring became a partner in
the bank, it had shared in government contracts to supply the large military
expedition sent by Dundas to the Caribbean in 1793. 93 Funding the invading
British army in Saint Domingue included supplying “the pay of the Colonial Corps
for the purchase of provisions, stores, negroes, horses”. 94 As British forces were
increasingly strained by both the extreme mortality caused by yellow fever in the
Caribbean and the unremitting nature of black military resistance in both French
and British colonies, so Dundas’s expedition increasingly relied on the purchase
of slaves to serve as front-line soldiers and supporting auxilaries. In fighting to
defend slavery in the Caribbean, the British army itself became more dependent
on slavery. 95
92
Philip Ziegler, The Sixth Great Power: Barings, 1762-1929 (London: Collins, 1988) ,
pp. 43-60.
93
Austin, Baring Brothers and the Birth of Modern Finance, p. 12
94
Baring Archive, NP 1A.2.1, John Wigglesworth, Roll of Foreign Accounts, 1814
95
Roger Norman Buckley, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the Military
in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998)
55
Figure 5: Distributed Profits of Baring Brothers & Co, 1762-1867 (£)
400000
350000
300000
250000
200000
150000
100000
50000
17
62
17
66
17
70
17
74
17
78
17
82
17
86
17
90
17
94
17
98
18
02
18
06
18
10
18
14
18
18
18
22
18
26
18
30
18
34
18
38
18
42
18
46
18
50
18
54
18
58
18
62
18
66
0
Source: Philip Ziegler, The sixth great power: Barings 1762-1929 (1988)
In 1803, Alexander Baring took the lead role in Paris and North America in
organizing the finance for the American acquisition of French Louisiana. The
‘Louisiana Purchase’ of one million square miles dramatically expanded the
geography of slavery on the North American mainland. The transaction
revolutionized the slave society of Louisiana from a marginal French colony on
the fringes of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to an intensive sugar economy
receiving an estimated 280,000 slaves through the “internal” slave trade between
1810 and 1860. 96 Arranging the $15 million purchase, Baring Brothers probably
received more than $1 million in commissions. 97 As shown by the spike in profits
in the early 1800s in Figure 5, Barings therefore significantly profited from the
96
Michael Tadman, ”The Interregional Slave Trade in the History and Myth-Making of
the US South” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal Slave Trades in the
Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 120.
97
http://www.baringarchive.org.uk/ features_exhibitions/louisiana_purchase/6; Hidy, The
House of Baring in American trade and finance, p. 34
56
expansion of slavery in North America, and in the 1820s and 1830s invested
heavily in developing the commercial infrastructure of Louisiana’s slave-based
economy.
Between 1805 and 1817, Alexander Baring served as a director of the
Bank of England and was prominent in arranging finance for Britain’s war effort
and France’s reparations which resulted in enormous profits for Baring Brothers
estimated at over £700,000. After Alexander became a partner in Barings in
1804,
Initially he received a quarter of the profits; this rose to five-eighths
between 1810 and 1815, and then to two-thirds between 1816 and 1823; it
then fell back to a quarter towards the end of his leadership. 98
At a time when the Haitian Revolution led many contemporaries to see slavery as
a system in decline, Alexander Baring found his personal wealth dramatically
increased enabling the purchase of Northington Grange. Contemporaries were
struck by Barings’ acquisition of estates across southern England, and it was
claimed that he had spent one million pounds on land by his death in 1848.
98
Orbell, “Baring, Alexander, first Baron Ashburton (1773–1848)” 2004.
57
11) Free trade’s champions, abolition’s opponents
The year before the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Baring
entered the House of Commons, where he served until 1835. He was a strong
advocate of free trade following his father, Francis Baring, who in mid 1799 had
planned a large scale speculation in the West Indies, particularly Dutch Surinam
made possible by the low prices of staple exports from the region caused by
wartime conditions. Alexander Baring was also a visible opponent of abolitionist
campaigns in Parliament for full emancipation. In 1823, Baring attacked both
Wilberforce and Buxton for lacking experience or interest in the colonies and
exaggerating the atrocities of British slave owners and the “physical sufferings of
the Negro” in the British Caribbean. Instead he argued,
The name of slave is a harsh one; but their real condition is undoubtedly,
in many respects, superior to that of most of the peasantry of Europe.
They were well clothed and well fed, and he believed, generally treated
with justice and kindness. 99
He warned that
if the Negroes in the West Indies were liberated, either immediately or
remotely, or in any way whatever, those colonies would be of no further
value to Great Britain. 100
99
Mr Alexander Baring’s Speech in the House of Commons on the 15 day of May, 1823
on Mr Buxton’s Motion for a Resolution Declaratory of Slavery in the British Colonies
being contrary to the English Constitution and to Christianity (London: Marchant 1823),
p. 6.
100
Ibid. p.7
58
Criticizing the constant petitioning of Parliament by abolitionists as
deluded, Baring positioned himself as a disinterested yet experienced
commentator. He argued
I am not myself a West India proprietor, but I have seen cultivation carried
on by Slaves in some of the American States, in Georgia and Carolina;
and I must say, that from all I saw there, and from every information I have
received from our own colonies, I do not believe, on looking about the
world and considering the general lot of mankind, that if I was called upon
to say what part of the globe most particularly excited my sympathy and
commiseration, I do not believe that I should fix upon the Negroes of the
West Indies, as far as regards their food and clothing, and the whole of
their treatment. 101
In April 1831, Alexander Baring was still a committed opponent of
emancipation on economic grounds, arguing that,
notwithstanding that it is the fashion to undervalue these possessions, I
feel a conviction that their destruction would reduce us from the rank of a
first-rate commercial country, to a state of comparative destitution. 102
He claimed that the West Indies were “real and material sources of wealth and
power” for Britain, and that immediate emancipation threatened the “destruction
101
Report of the Debate in the House of Commons on Friday, the 15th of April, 1831; on
Mr Powell Buxton’s Motion to Consider and Adopt the Best Means for Effecting the
Abolition of Colonial Slavery (London: Mirror of Parliament, 1831), p. 97.
102
Ibid, p 95.
59
of all the capital now employed in that branch of commerce”. 103 Again he rejected
abolitionist propaganda, claiming that,
“I have known much of the state of slaves in our colonies and in America,
and I think I am warranted in saying, that the accounts which have
reached us in various publications of the condition of negro slaves are
essentially false…
104
He went on to argue that,
“The deception would consist, as it does in the case of the West Indies, in
representing casual enormities and crimes as the daily and ordinary
occurrences of life”. 105
Recognising the momentum of the abolitionist campaign he called for the
mitigation of slave conditions, with reforms being enacted through local
legislatures in the Caribbean.
11) Slaves as commodities, slaves as commodity producers
During the 1820s debates over the amelioration of slavery, the House of
Baring was seeking to withdraw from ownership of West Indian properties in
Jamaica, Trinidad and Martinique. 106 This contrasted to many British merchants
such as the Gladstone or Barkly families who increased their holdings of
103
Ibid, pp. 95 and 97.
Ibid, pp. 99-100
105
Ibid, p. 99
106
Baring Archive, HC5, 5.3.1, 5.4.1 and 5.6.1
104
60
Caribbean property during this period through acquiring bankrupt estates. The
Barings effort to detach themselves from plantation ownership was probably
motivated more by concerns about the financial crises in London during the mid1820s than by abolitionist scruples. By the mid-1820s Alexander Baring was no
longer involved in the daily management of the bank and he officially retired in
1830.
As Alexander Baring stepped down from active management of the bank,
American-born Joshua Bates was appointed as a partner in Baring Brothers in
1828. At the time the firm traded across a range of commodities in tea, sugar,
coffee, indigo, cotton, rum, spices, tobacco, flour, wool, cooper and iron. Stanley
Chapman argues that,
Bates excised a large part of the traditional business in… Mauritius when
he found that the planters did not cover their bills by the crop for that
season. 107
It was probably with same motives that the House of Baring sought to divest itself
from similar sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Yet despite this withdrawal, in
mid-1830 Barings still had £250,000 invested in mortgages on West Indian
estates which represented a sum equivalent to half of the bank’s capital. 108
During the early 1830s, Barings opened an office in Liverpool to profit from
the port’s emergence as the main gateway of American trade, particularly slave107
Stanley Chapman, The Rise of Merchant Banking (London: George Allen & Unwin
1984), p. 26.
108
Hidy, The House of Baring in American trade and finance, p. 129.
61
produced cotton. Joseph Inikori’s Africans and the Industrial Revolution in
England (2002) emphasizes the significance of slave-produced commodities in
shaping Atlantic commerce and British economic growth. This nuances our
understandings of slavery’s connections to Britain from the work of Eric Williams
in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) which focused on the direct profits of slave
trading and slave ownership. The commercial activities of Baring Brothers were
little affected by the British abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807 or
Britain’s abolition of slavery in 1833 because in some ways they exemplify
Inikori’s argument. It is striking that British abolition in 1833 was paralleled by
Baring Brothers aggressively investing in slave-produced American cotton so that
in the same year it represented a quarter of the bank’s total revenues. 109
Baring also acted as a “banker’s bank” for new American banks, including
selling over one million pounds worth of stock for the Union Bank of Louisiana in
1832 and in advancing £6500 to the Planers’ Association Bank of Louisiana in
1834. 110 During the 1830s Louisiana received over 67,000 slaves from other US
states, and these import levels were maintained during the 1840s and 1850s. 111
In the House of Commons Alexander Baring argued that emancipation would
result in the restarting of the trans-Atlantic slave trade due to the global demand
for slave-produced sugar from Cuba and Brazil. At the same time, it was British
109
Austin, Baring Brothers and the Birth of Modern Finance, p. 63.
Ibid., pp. 27-28
111
Michael Tadman, “The interregional slave trade in the history and myth-making of the
US South” in Walter Johnson, ed., The Chattel Principle: Internal slave trades in the
Americas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p 120.
110
62
demand for slave-produced cotton that pushed the Baring’s annual profits over
£100 million in the mid 1830s. 112
13) The Webster-Ashburton Treaty
In 1835 Alexander Baring received the title of Lord Ashburton, following
twenty-nine years of service in the House of Commons culminating in 1834 with
the presidency of the Board of Trade. After a series of crises in the late 1830s
over the border between Britain’s colonies in Canada and the American states of
Maine and New York, Ashburton was rushed across the Atlantic as a Special
Minister to negotiate a settlement with American Secretary of State Daniel
Webster (1782–1852). Ashburton’s previous investments in Maine, his family ties
and business connections to the US made him a valuable mediator at a time
when tensions over the north-east American border and Britain’s policing of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade threatened to erupt into open warfare between Britain
and America. Ashburton was focused on securing agreement on the demarcation
of the border so as to mark a new period of collaboration in Anglo-American
relations, however it was the issue of the slave trading which most threatened to
destabilize treaty negotiations. 113
112
Austin, Baring Brothers and the Birth of Modern Finance, p. 86.
Howard Jones and Donald Allen Rakestraw, Prologue to Manifest Destiny: AngloAmerican Relations in the 1840s (Wilmington: SR Books, 1997)
113
63
Just after midnight on the 8 November 1841, the enslaved cargo of the
ship the Creole seized control of the vessel midway on its journey from Virginia to
New Orleans. Of the 135 slaves on board, nineteen rebels left the hold killing one
of the slave traders on board. Having disarmed the white crew, they altered
course to the British colony of the Bahamas and reached its capital Nassau on
the following day. British authorities in Nassau arrested the nineteen rebels for
murder, while the local American consul organized an armed attempt to seize the
Creole and smuggle its remaining cargo back to the US. Three years after
emancipation in the British empire, large crowds of black Bahamians quickly
appeared around the port to prevent the removal of the ship, leading British
authorities to free all the slaves remaining on the vessel. 114
For Lord Ashburton, the tensions between the American and British
governments over the Creole directly endangered the treaty he was formulating
during the summer of 1842 with Daniel Webster. American President John Tyler
(1790-1862) of the slave state of Virginia was so concerned about the Creole
case that he delayed the negotiations while he sought a British commitment that
runaway slaves would be returned, but this was strongly resisted in London.
Ultimately, an extradition treaty was included as part of the Anglo-American
agreement covering murder (such as in the Creole case) but not mutiny by slaves
or marronage. Formally the Webster-Ashburton Treaty provided a joint protest by
America and Britain to Brazil and Spain over their continued slave trading. It also
114
Walter Johnson, "White lies: Human property and domestic slavery aboard the slave
ship Creole", Atlantic Studies, 5: 2 (2008), pp. 237-263.
64
contained a bilateral agreement to provide anti-slavery squadrons in West Africa,
although this was intended by the Americans as a measure to limit British
interference with commercial shipping off the American coast (including vessels
carrying slaves between US states). 115 The full abolition of the trans-Atlantic
slave trade was seen by Tyler and others American leaders as completely
separate from their own thriving “internal” slave trade.
An image that emerged just prior to these debates over the slave trades of
the early 1840s is Joseph Turner’s The Slave Ship: Slavers throwing overboard
the dead and dying, typhoon coming on (1840). Marcus Wood has provided a
detailed history of the painting’s reception by both the public and critics who were
largely alienated by its style or content. Turner’s art evoked the Zong case of
1781 in which several hundred slaves were drowned at sea as it was more
profitable to claim insurance money for the loss of cargo than sell them in poor
health in Jamaica. The hostility to Turner’s work was also partly because it broke
with the abolitionist canon of iconography of sexual exploitation, dependence and
gratitude. 116
Despite abolitionist celebrations of full emancipation in the British Empire
in 1838, this was still a period which historian Dale Tomich has labeled “the
second slavery” when cotton, coffee and sugar resulted in the massive expansion
115
Wilbur Devereux Jones, “The Influence of Slavery on the Webster-Ashburton
Negotiations”, Journal of Southern History, 22: 1 (1956), pp. 48-58
116
Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and
America 1780-1865 (New York: Routledge 2000), pp. 41-68.
65
of slave economies in the USA, Brazil and Cuba. 117 As the case of the Creole
symbolized, Turner’s The Slave Ship was a painting about the present as much
as the past. The anti-slavery measures of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty focused
on the trans-Atlantic slave trade which had become increasingly marginal to
American economic development by the nineteenth century. The treaty remained
silent about the massive redistribution of the enslaved population from the
southern states of the Atlantic seaboard to the emerging cotton and sugar
plantations of the Mississippi Delta.
14) Baring Brothers in Saint Croix
In the mid-1820s, as Alexander Baring was withdrawing from active
leadership of the House of Baring, the bank acquired control of several
plantations in the Danish Caribbean colony of Saint Croix. While the bank
disposed of its holdings in the British Caribbean it was to maintain ownership of
these estates for over fifty years. During this time period, these properties were
run on slave labour until 1848, after which authorities in Saint Croix enacted a
coercive system of apprenticeship that sought to restrict the formerly enslaved to
labouring on the plantations for the next 15 years. In 1831 as Alexander Baring
publicly identified himself as not a “West India proprietor”, Baring Brothers owned
slaves in Danish Saint Croix who would not be freed for another seventeen
117
Dale Tomich, "The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arrango y Parreno, Political
Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba." Comparative Studies in Society and
History. 45: 1 (2003), pp. 4-28.
66
years, a full decade after the enactment of full emancipation in the British Empire
in 1838.
118
Carved out of centre of Saint Croix during the mid-eighteenth century, the
Bethlehem estates were two of the largest plantations on the Danish island
colony. Their name may have been inspired by the Moravian missionaries who
had recently arrived in the region. Upper Bethlehem and Lower Bethlehem were
owned by the Heyliger family from nearby Saint Eustatius, where Johannes
Heyliger was Governor of the Dutch island between 1743 and 1752. His daughter
Elizabeth Heyliger (1750 – 1779) inherited both Bethlehem estates, and by the
time of her death the Great House at Upper Bethlehem was located next to a
formal French styled flowerbed.
Together, the two Bethlehem estates comprised 1,125 acres of which 60%
were growing sugar and had an enslaved population of 356 in 1779. In 1824 the
family sold Upper Bethlehem whereupon it passed to the Barings. 119 As one
visitor to Saint Croix in the 1820s noted,
A large proportion of the plantations are the property of Englishmen or of
their descendants, and nearly all of them are mortgaged to the
government, or to English and American merchants, but chiefly to those of
118
Report of the Debate in the House of Commons on Friday, the 15th of April, 1831, p.
97.
119
Inge Mejer Antonsen, “Bethlehem Plantation: A history”, The Virgin Islands Daily
News, 1 August 1975, p. 44 and 46; Brady, Observations upon the State of Negro
Slavery in the Island of Santa Cruz (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1829), p. 8; Neville
A.T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies (Mona: University of the West Indies
Press, 1992), p. 76.
67
the former nation; and many of them to such a large amount as to render
the liquidation of their incumbrances an almost hopeless event. 120
The Barings joined the large number of British slaveholders in the Danish colony
as debates about the full emancipation of slaves within the British empire was
intensifying.
Figure 6: Enslaved population on Upper Bethlehem estate by age and
gender, 1841
Over 76
Female
71 to 75
Male
66 to 70
61 to 65
56 to 60
51 to 55
46 to 50
41 to 45
36 to 40
31 to 35
26 to 30
21 to 25
16 to 20
11 to 15
6 to 10
1 to 5
0
5
10
15
20
25
Source: Saint Croix Census of 1841
120
98
Brady, Observations upon the State of Negro Slavery in the Island of Santa Cruz, p.
68
The Saint Croix Census of 1841 provides a detailed vision of the enslaved
labour force who worked on the Baring estates of Upper Bethlehem and
Fredensborg
121
Producing sugar and rum, the estate at Upper Bethlehem had
around two hundred slaves while that at Fredensborg had just under three
hundred slaves. The greater unevenness in age and gender distributions at
Upper Bethlehem is perhaps because its earlier connection to the Lower
Bethlehem estate had enabled considerable internal transfers of slaves.
Figure 7: Enslaved population on Fredensborg estate by age and gender,
1841
Over 76
Female
71 to 75
Male
66 to 70
61 to 65
56 to 60
51 to 55
46 to 50
41 to 45
36 to 40
31 to 35
26 to 30
21 to 25
16 to 20
11 to 15
6 to 10
1 to 5
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Source: Saint Croix Census of 1841
121
St. Croix Population Database 1734–1917, Virgin Islands Social History Associates.
69
On both estates, the enslaved were organised into gangs to work in the
cane fields, with able-bodied adult men and women making up the “big gang”.
These usually performed the hardest plantation tasks such as cane-holing
(digging the holes to plant the cane) and cutting the sugar-cane at harvest. As
soon as children were deemed able to work (at age six), they entered the “little
gang” with the elderly. Denmark had legislated against the trans-Atlantic slave
trade in 1802, however four decades after abolition Africans still made up a fifth
of the enslaved labour force in the “Big Gang” at Upper Bethlehem.
Table 3: Place of birth of slaves on the “Big Gang” at Upper Bethlehem
estate, 1841
St Croix
Africa
St Johns
Guadeloupe
Total
Male
33
15
3
0
51
Female
32
3
1
2
38
Total
65
18
4
2
89
Source: Saint Croix Census of 1841
The occupational hierarchy at Upper Bethlehem and Fredensborg
replicated other sugar plantations across the Caribbean with a male elite of
skilled slaves at its summit. House servants were predominantly female, and the
much larger group of servants at Fredensborg was probably due to the continued
residence there of seven members of the Heyliger family who had originally
owned the estate. On both plantations, eighty per cent of the enslaved were
70
defined as workers, showing how only the very young or incapacitated were not
mobilized for labour.
Table 4: Occupations of the enslaved at Upper Bethlehem estate by age
and gender, 1841
Male
Number Average
Age
Female
Age
Number Average
Range
Carpenter
5
52.6
Cooper
4
39.8 36 - 43
Mason
4
30.5 20 - 43
Age
Age
Range
36-66
36 –
House servant
2
25.5 23 - 28
Huckster
5
50.2
51
1
64
64
16 –
Big gang
51
41.2 16 - 64
38
33.9
62
Small gang
23
21.8
6 - 65
25
27.4
7 – 67
8
3.25
1-7
10
3.3
1–6
65.6 43 - 74
14
69
55– 91
Incapable of working
(child)
Incapable of working
(adult)
10
Total
107
Source: Saint Croix Census of 1841
93
71
Table 5: Occupations of the enslaved at Fredensborg estate by age and
gender, 1841
Male
Number Average
Age
Female
Age
Number Average
Range
Age
Age
Range
Stillman
1
52
52
Blacksmith
4
41 28 - 57
Carpenter
4
29.5 20 - 35
Cooper
10
43.7 22 - 56
Mason
5
46.2 34 - 57
House servant
4
46.25 21 - 57
21
44.9 10 - 71
Big gang
63
33.6 16 - 62
67
32.9 13 - 51
Small gang
25
23.32
7 - 67
26
34.7
7 - 71
20
2.65
1-5
14
2.9
1–6
10
56.7 43 - 67
18
66.9
41– 80
Incapable of working
(child)
Incapable of working
(adult)
Total
146
146
Source: Saint Croix Census of 1841
The spatial organisation of Upper Bethlehem and Fredensborg parallel
those of other sugar plantations across the Caribbean. Barry Higman has
emphasized how the physical properties of sugar cane (the need to extract juice
as soon as possible from the cane after it has been cut) resulted in the
72
processing works lying at the centre of most sugar estates. The Danish Royal
Library’s map of Fredensborg also shows how slave villages were at times
arranged in linear rows to facilitate surveillance and control from the overseer’s
quarters. However, elsewhere in the Caribbean archeological evidence has
shown that even where such structures were imposed, the enslaved would use
the spaces between or behind houses to live beyond the vision of the overseer.
The ING Archives holds a rich correspondence between Baring Brothers
and their agents in Saint Croix over the management of bank’s plantations. Key
events that are discussed include the slave uprising of early July 1848 that
resulted in emancipation being proclaimed in the island and debates around the
amount of financial compensation paid to slave owners in 1853. In late 1848,
after the death of Alexander Baring, the bank received a report from its attorney
in Saint Croix that Danish authorities were seeking to compel the slaves to
remain on the estates after emancipation,
I am pretty confident that the people would not quietly submit to it – they
are now looking forward to the 3 of October, as the time when they shall
be free from such compulsory residence, asserting that they will only then
consider themselves as free. Still I cannot find that any intend to leave…
they say they will continue to live there and work, but I could not get them
to agree on what terms or what wages; what I offered they did not refuse
but said it was soon enough to make agreement when time come. 122
122
Baring Archives, HC5, 5.5.1, 26 September 1848, W. Beech to Baring Brothers
73
Between 1849 and the Fireburn Rebellion of 1878, the formerly enslaved in Saint
Croix were forced to remain working on the plantations they served during
slavery through mandatory year-long contracts and aggressive vagrancy laws.
In economic terms, the Baring estates in Saint Croix did not directly
contribute to the development of Northington Grange. The bank acquired them as
Alexander Baring was withdrawing from its financial operations, and their
revenues were significantly surpassed by the bank’s other streams of income.
However, the estates exemplify British involvement in slave economies after
abolition in the British empire in 1838, and the intense conflicts across the
Caribbean over the extent to which emancipation would change the economic
and social order of European colonies. Early in 1859 Barings rejected the
introduction of indentured African labour (usually slaves who had been
purchased on the West African coast) on their St Croix estates. 123 Almost two
decades after formal emancipation in Saint Croix, the Fireburn insurrection
expressed the frustrations of the formerly enslaved against the efforts to restrict
their own visions of freedom. 124
15) Slavery-related symbolism and design at Northington Grange
The inventory of 1795 completed for the Prince of Wales before he took
occupation of Northington Grange provides one of the best guides to the contents
and design of the Samwell house.
123
Baring Archives, HC5, 5.5.1, 28 April 1859, W. Beech to Baring Brothers
Clifton E. Marsh, “A socio-historical analysis of the Labor Revolt of 1878 in the Danish
West Indies”, Phylon 42: 4 (1981), pp. 335-345
124
74
The entrance hall on the North side of the Samwell House had little
reference to the Americas, although it expressed global consumption through an
Indian mat and Turkish carpet on the floor and bamboo chairs with a large
painting of bear hunting and classical marble cisterns. In the eating parlour,
mahogany was the dominant material for furnishings from pier tables, a
sideboard table, pedestal plate warmers, twenty foot long dining tables, dumb
waiters, painting frames, a dozen chairs with satin seats, and on the doors and
shutters. To the west, the sitting room was also filled with mahogany furniture,
from a tea caddy to French chairs, to ten splay back chairs, a round dinning
table, backgammon board, horseshoe table, and fire screen. 125 Although
mahogany furniture could be found throughout the living quarters of the house its
pervasiveness across the eating parlour and the sitting room is particularly
striking. It is possible that some of this mahogany may have been harvested by
enslaved workers either in Jamaica or Central America. Although Jamaican
supplies of mahogany were declining at the end of the eighteenth century driving
up prices, in British Honduras (Belize) production expanded dramatically after
1786, as small gangs of slaves were sent into the forests to extract the timber. 126
125
Jane Geddes, “The Prince of Wales at the Grange, Northington: An inventory of
1795”, Furniture History, 22 (1986), pp. 190-192.
126
O. Nigel Bolland, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize: Essays in Historical
Sociology (Jamaica: ISER, 1988), pp. 44-52.
75
For many in England, mahogany’s high price, polished surface and physical
weight signified refined consumption and elite status. 127
In the west of the house was an imperial staircase that contained
compartments which were painted with historical scenes, probably
overwhelmingly of classical antiquity based on the comments of Horace
Walpole. 128 The house was filled with paintings of classical and religious subjects
or portraits of leading statesmen. From the 1795 inventory there appears to be
little direct representation of Atlantic slavery in the design or contents of the
house. During his period leasing the Grange, the Prince of Wales commissioned
statues of “four boys 4ft high holding lamps in immitation [sic] of bronze, made on
purpose for the gallery”. 129 Given the classical motifs elsewhere in the house,
these dark figures were most probably intended to evoke the ancient world rather
than Africa.
After the Grange was transformed by Wilkins, perhaps the best source for
the nineteenth century interior of the house are the photographic collections held
by the Hampshire Archives and English Heritage. Most strikingly, these
photographs reveal a frieze on the fireplace in the dining room which depicts a
banquet in ancient Greece in which four women are serving and entertaining a
127
Jennifer L. Anderson, “Nature’s currency: The Atlantic mahogany trade and the
commodification of nature in the eighteenth century”, Early American Studies , 2:1
(2004) pp. 48-80
128
Redmill, “A House Ahead of its Time”, p. 1167, Geddes, “The Prince of Wales at the
Grange, Northington”, p. 187.
129
Geddes, “The Prince of Wales at the Grange, Northington”, p. 177.
76
group of five seated figures. The dress, cropped hair and activities of the
standing women suggest their servitude. 130 Given their role in providing
entertainment, these women were probably hetairai (companions / elite
prostitutes) who were either enslaved, free or foreigners. 131 Jenifer Neils argues
of the hetairai that “as flute girls, dancers, fellow kottabos players, drinkers, and
ultimately sex partners, they are ubiquitous in Attic vase painting”. 132
Fireplace in the dining room
Source: English Heritage (Ref:CC56/14)
The frieze was designed by architect C.R. Cockerell and commissioned in
1824 from the sculptor John Flaxman (1755–1826). Cockerell claimed that he
intended for the chimney-piece that,
130
John H. Oakley, “Some ‘Other’ Members of the Athenian Household: Maids and their
mistresses in fifth-century Athenian Art” in Beth Cohen, ed., Not the Classical Ideal:
Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 232-246
131
Yvon Garlan, Slavery in Ancient Greece, trans Janet Lloyd, (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1988), p. 146.
132
Jenifer Neils, “Others within the Other: An Intimate Look at Hetairai and Maenads” in
Beth Cohen, ed., Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in
Greek Art, (Leiden: Brill, 2000), p. 208.
77
the sculpture (the main object) may be made more principal… I have
attempted (though very lamely) a sketch of a groupe from Millingen’s
vases and some tracings of mine in Italy. 133
Between 1810 and 1817 Cockerell had travelled the Mediterannean, studying
Greek and Roman architecture, participating in archaeological excavations and
the acquisition of classical artifacts for Britain while painting and sketching
extensively. Flaxman has also spent seven years in Italy at the end of the
eighteen century studying ancient sculpture. Therefore the commitments of both
architect and artist were to produce as authentic a representation of Greek art as
possible, drawing on the authority of James Millingen's recently published
Engravings of Painted Greek Vases (1822).
Cockerell was strongly critical of other architects such as Wilkins who
sought to replicate Greek architecture rather than appropriating and transforming
it for contemporaries. 134 After visiting the Grange in mid January 1823, he was
full of praise for its bold design, but also had a long list of criticisms of what he
perceived to be Wilkins’s incorrect use of classical motifs. Alexander Baring had
less intellectual concerns about the design details at the Grange, and was
focused on how to make the house comfortable for his family, with Cockerell
noting
Mr B[aring] wants persuading of its [the Grange] charms, if it were his own
child he would feel them more – these works will render it more so and will
133
David Watkin, The Life and Work of C.R. Cockerell, R.A. (London: A. Zwemmer,
1974), p. 172.
134
Ibid, pp. 66-69.
78
attach him to it. There is nothing like it on this side of Arcadia, yet full of
defects and ill contrivance. 135
Baring declined the construction of a second great portico proposed by Cockerell,
opting instead for a more practical extension with a dining-room, conservatory
and additional bedrooms. With limited scope for external embellishment (apart
from the conservatory’s modest Ionic portico), Cockerell devoted much of his
energy on the interior of the Grange.
Fireplace in the dining room
Source: English Heritage (Ref:AA64/219)
David Watkin’s biography of Cockerell emphasizes how focused the
architect was on the design of the dining-room. Watkin’s argues
135
Ibid, p. 71.
79
It is clear from the diary that he was obsessed by a desire to make of this
room a tour de force, a composition matching in distinction and originality
the architecture of the house itself. 136
Cockerell identified his aims as “to make this room as pure in architecture as
poss[ibl]e as classical by figures recalling such associations, drove at novelty, to
avoid common place”. 137
After contacting James Millingen for advice and extensive scholarly
research, Cockerell was able to move forward with the dining room design, which
Watkins argues is
…one of the most elegant and scholarly rooms of the whole Greek
Revival. Based ultimately on the cella of the temple at Bassae, it achieved
that jeweled, casket-like quality which we know Cockerell felt was
characteristic of Greek design. 138
The fireplace frieze was therefore as central to the authentication of Cockerell’s
interior remodeling as column design had been for Wilkins’s exterior
transformation.
The dining room fireplace frieze from Northington Grange reveals how
slavery and servitude were accepted as a central element of the classical
landscape, but were constructed as urban, paternal and un-racialised. Such
images shaped eighteenth century understanding of Atlantic slavery, from the
136
Ibid, p. 171.
Ibid., 172.
138
Ibid.
137
80
writings of Adam Smith to Thomas Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and
Commerce of the Human Species published in 1786. It’s important to emphasize
that these classical motifs do not appear to be deliberate efforts to efface
connections to the modern Atlantic economy. Rather they were intended to
“authenticate” these sites revealing the scholarly erudition of their hosts.
H. Bedford Lemere, Interior of the dining room (1888)
Source: English Heritage (Ref: BL08705)
81
16) Tropical planting at the Grange
The conservatory designed by Cockerell was marked not only for its
pioneering use of prefabricated iron and glass, but also for the broad range of
plants it housed. The majority of the collection seems to have come from Asia
(Azaleas) and Australia (Acaias and Baksias). The conservatory did contain
Lantana mista from the Caribbean and pine trees from southern Brazil (Araucaria
Braziliensis) however it seems to have been dominated by specimens that
originated in Asia and the Pacific rather than the Atlantic. 139
H. Bedford Lemere, Conservatory (1888)
Source: English Heritage (Ref: BL08704)
139
The Gardener’s Magazine (London: Longman, 1826), pp. 110-111.
82
17) Recommendations for further research
Further possibilities for research are the substantial art collection built up
by Alexander Baring that was on display at the Grange during the nineteenth
century. This collection ultimately passed on to Louisa Baring (1827 – 1903),
although no inventory appears to have survived of her holdings. 140 In 1814,
Baring purchased a series of marble reliefs by Pierre Julien titled “Episodes of
Farm Work” which had been owned by the Empress Joséphine and displayed at
her residence at Malmaison. 141 Before becoming wife of Napeolon I, Joséphine
de Beauharnais (1763 – 1814) had lived in Martinique where she belonged to
one of the island’s leading planter families, and she died owning slaves at the
family sugar estate of the La Pagerie. Whether these reliefs were displayed at
the Grange or at the Baring’s residence in London would require further enquiry.
The Lilly Library at Indiana University holds the papers of William
Bingham, with accounts and correspondence from his time in Martinique. It also
holds original correspondence on the Webster-Ashburton Treaty. Another source
for archival records on Bingham’s activities in Martinique would be the Archives
Nationales d'Outre-mer at Aix-en-Provence in France.
140
Virginia Surtees, “Baring , Louisa Caroline, Lady Ashburton (1827–1903)”, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
141
Michael Benisovitch, “Pierre Julien at Rambouillet", Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs, 79:461 (1941), pp. 43-45.
83
More details of the Baring estates in St Croix could be obtained through
the microfilm series M1883 from the National Archives and Records
Administration in Washington and the Danish National Archives in Copenhagen.
Alnwick Castle holds a large collection of correspondence and papers of
Henry Drummond (1786-1860), some of which would cover his period of
ownership of Northington Grange.
17.1) Recommended readings for understanding slavery at
Northington Grange
David Patrick Geggus, Slavery, War and Revolution: The British Occupation of
Saint Domingue, 1793-1798 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982)
Provides a detailed study of British engagement in the Haitian Revolution,
including the involvement of Henry Dundas and Baring Brothers.
Neville A.T. Hall, Slave Society in the Danish West Indies (Mona: University of
the West Indies Press, 1992),
Comprehensive account of slavery and emancipation in Saint Croix
84
Joseph E. Inikori. Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in
International Trade and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002)
Strongly argued study that explores the significance of slave-produced
cotton in British industrialization.
Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery, Capitalism, and Imperialism in
the Mississippi Valley (Harvard University Press, forthcoming)
Analyses the significance of the Louisiana Purchase in transforming
slavery in Mississippi delta.
Enrico Dal Lago and Constantina Katsari, eds., Slave Systems: Ancient and
Modern (Cambridge: University of Cambridge 2008)
An edited collection of leading historians making connections and
comparisons between slavery in classical Greece and Rome, and slavery
in the modern Atlantic world.
85
18) Bibliography
18.1) Primary Sources
Hampshire Archives and Local Studies, Winchester
3M60 - Records of Messrs Drummond
44 M 69/E22/1/1/1, 1787 Particulars of the Grange Estates
John Rylands Library, Manchester
GB 133 Eng MS 907 - Letters from Henry Dundas to Pitt, 1793-1805
The Baring Archive, ING, London
1763-1899: house correspondence, letter books, ledgers, journals
London Metropolitan Archives
Acc/0775/805-806 Agreement between Samuel Dukinfield and Samuel
Touchet, 6/12/1756
National Archives, London
WO 1/921 Dundas correspondence with French planters
CO 166/1/58, 63 Letter from John Drummond to Henry Dundas, principal
secretary of state, concerning the state of the French Windward Islands.
1794
National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh
GD51 Henry Dundas Collection
GD237 Records of Messrs Tods Murray and Jamieson WS
PROB Probate records
Manuscript Collections, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh
Henry Dundas, correspondence and papers
The Royal Bank of Scotland Archives, Edinburgh
GB 1502 DR - Records of Messrs Drummond
St. Croix Population Database 1734–1917, Virgin Islands Social History
Associates, http://www.visharoots.org/
“The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database”, www.slavevoyages.org
86
Mr Alexander Baring’s Speech in the House of Commons on the 15 day of May,
1823 on Mr Buxton’s Motion for a Resolution Declaratory of Slavery in the British
Colonies being Contrary to the English Constitution and to Christianity (London:
Marchant 1823),
Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman's (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1904)
Brady, Observations upon the State of Negro Slavery in the Island of Santa Cruz
(London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1829)
Carlyle, Thomas, "Occasional discourse on the Negro question", Fraser's
Magazine for Town and Country 40 (1849), pp. 670-679.
Carlyle, Thomas, “Occasional discourse on the Nigger question” (London:
Bosworth, 1853)
Cugoano, Ottobah, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of
the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (London: 1787)
Drummond, Henry, Speeches in Parliament and some Miscellaneous Pamphlets
of the late Henry Drummond, Vol. 1, ed. Lord Lovaine (London: Bosworth and
Harrison, 1860),
Ellis, John, A Description of the Mangostan and the Bread-fruit: The First,
Esteemed one of the most Delicious; the Other, the most Useful of all the Fruits
(London, 1775),
Ellis, John, An Historical Account of Coffee: With an Engraving, and Botanical
Description of the Tree. To which are added Sundry Papers Relative to its
Culture and Use (London: Edward and Charles Dilly, 1774)
Facts Relative to the Conduct of the War in the West Indies; Collected from the
Speech of the Right Hon. Henry Dundas, in the House of Commons, on the 28th
of April, 1796, and from the Documents laid before the House upon that Subject
(London: J. Owen, 1796)
Froude, James Anthony, The English in the West Indies; or, The Bow of Ulysses
(London: Longmans Green and Co., 1888)
The Gardener’s Magazine (London: Longman, 1826)
Henley, Robert, A Memoir of the Life of Robert Henley, Earl of Northington
(London: John Murray, 1831)
87
Report of the Debate in the House of Commons on Friday, the 15th of April, 1831;
on Mr Powell Buxton’s Motion to Consider and Adopt the Best Means for
Effecting the Abolition of Colonial Slavery (London: Mirror of Parliament, 1831)
Substance of the Debate in the House of Commons, on the 15th May, 1823, on a
Motion for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British
Dominions (London: Ellerton and Henderson, 1823)
Thomas, J. J., Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude
(London: T. F. Unwin, 1889)
Wilkins, William, The Antiquities of Magna Graecia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1807)
“Transcript: The Somerset Case”, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/
blackhistory/rights/transcripts/somerset_case.htm
18.2) Secondary Sources
Alberts, Robert C., The Golden Voyage: The Life and Times of William Bingham
1752-1804 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969)
Anderson, Jennifer L., “Nature’s currency: The Atlantic mahogany trade and the
commodification of nature in the eighteenth century”, Early American Studies 2:1
(2004) pp. 48-80.
Anstey, Roger, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760-1810
(London: Macmillan, 1975)
Antonsen, Inge Mejer, “Bethlehem Plantation: A history”, The Virgin Islands Daily
News, 1 August 1975, p. 44 and 46.
Austin, Peter E., Baring Brothers and the birth of Modern Finance (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2007)
Bayly, C. A., Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World, 1780-1830
(London: Longman, London: 1989)
Beckett, J.V., “Inheritance and fortune in the eighteenth century: the rise of Sir
James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale”, Transactions of the Cumberland and
Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, 87 (1987), pp. 171–178.
Bolitho, Hector and Derek Peel, The Drummonds of Charing Cross (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1967)
88
Bolland, O. Nigel, Colonialism and Resistance in Belize: Essays in Historical
Sociology (Kingston: ISER, 1988)
Brathwaite, Kamau, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971)
Benisovitch, Michael, “Pierre Julien at Rambouillet », Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs, 79:461 (1941), pp. 43-45.
Brown, Laurence, and Tara Inniss. "Slave Women, Family Strategies and the
Transition to Freedom in Barbados, 1834-1841" in Gywn Campbell, Suzanne
Miers and Joseph Miller, eds., Women in Slavery, (Columbus: Ohio University
Press, 2007)
Brown, Margret L., “William Bingham, Agent of the Continental Congress in
Martinique”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 61:1 (1937), pp.
54-87.
Brown, Margret L., “William Bingham: Eighteenth century magnate”,
Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 61:4 (1937), pp. 387-434.
Buckley, Roger Norman, The British Army in the West Indies: Society and the
Military in the Revolutionary Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998)
Carretta, Vincent, “’Property of Author’: Olaudah Equiano’s Place in the History of
the Book” in Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds., Genius in Bondage:
Literature of the early Black Atlantic (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
2001)
Carrington, Selwyn H.H., The British West Indies during the American Revolution
(Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1988)
Chapman, Stanley, The Rise of Merchant Banking (London: George Allen &
Unwin 1984)
Christie, Ian R., “George III and the Debt on Lord North's Election Account, 17801784”, English Historical Review, 78: 309 (1963), pp. 715-724.
Craton, Michael and Gail Saunders, Islanders in the Stream, Vol 1 (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1999)
Craton, Michael, “Loyalists Mainly to Themselves: the 'Black Loyalist' diaspora to
the Bahamas, 1783-c.1820” in Verene A. Shepherd, ed., Working slavery, pricing
freedom: perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora (New
York: Palgrave, 2002)
89
Crook, J. Mordaunt, “Grange Park Transformed” in Howard Colvin and John
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